Ballin' with my own Rap Genius API
I absolutely love Rap Genius - both the site itself, and the broader idea of being the Internet Talmud. It's full of epic content with crazy SEO and an awesome community. And their use of social media is bomb (1, 2). I'm even an editor there, such is my dedication to their idea.
One thing that's always been a shame is that this brilliant data source doesn't have a public API...
Being a lover of all things screen scraping, I decided to build my own in a Ruby gem. So, now there's a rapgenius gem, available to all with one command: gem install rapgenius. With a few simple lines of code, you can grab a track, and look at all its metadata and annotations.
There's still work to do around features like search and supporting other sites in the RapGenius fam (like PoetryGenius and NewsGenius).
At some point in the next couple of weeks, I'm hoping to pick up a project making use of my library. I'm particularly interesting in making my own embed code so I can embed annotations in my blog and have them update. I'd like to be able to do something like this...
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://rapgeniusapi.herokuapp.com/annotations/1234.js"></script>
...and have it beautifully styled and embedded, much like the tweet above. It's definitely doable.
I guess this project has three goals, only one of which has been achieved so far:
Practice my Ruby.
Hopefully pick up some Rap Genius swag...
And maybe get an internship with them for a week or two at some point... (please!)
Watch this space!
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