ProudI love the thought of integrating systems together. Automatically sharing information from one system to another based on some action is pretty cool to me. Especially when it comes from unlikely sources.
Before Musk bought Twitter, and ruined everything, I thought it would be fun to share when I had liked a song on Spotify, or added a song to one of my playlists. It would potentially drive some interaction with the community, and also provide a historical view of what I was listening to at any particular time. I was able to do this through Zapier, for free, because access to Twitter APIs and Spotify APIs were free. But then Musk had to go and change that! 😒
Then came along Bluesky. I was hopeful that I would be able to do the same, but alas Zapier did not have any connections with Bluesky. Soon, however, someone had created a connector but wanted to charge for it. Recently, I checked again and Zapier has their own native integration, but it’s part of their “premium” package… aka you have to pay for it.
After some internal debate, I decided I would just create my own. How hard could it be? I have a web server and Zapier was basically just polling Spotify at a set interval, and then if it found something it would post it. And wouldn’t you know it, I can do that via php scripts and a cron job!
So I set out to build the php scripts, with the help of AI of course as it’s been way too long since I wrote in php. I was actually amazed at how well the coding went. ChatGPT was able to spit out working code fairly quickly. I’m looking at Spotify every 15 minutes and if something has been liked or added to a specific playlist, I create a post on Bluesky. ChatGPT even went so far as offer suggestions for how to improve and personalize the posts even more. After several iterations, and some frustration along the way, I’ve got a working solution. I even have a weekly re-cap post that comes out on Sunday evenings!
I’m pretty proud of what I was able to cobble together. I may continue to tweak it, but I think it’s working good enough to start. Now, I just need to get in there and start liking more songs!
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