What?

@wearebasefm is a twitter bot which crawls @wearebase's Last.fm feed every minute and compares the latest track with what we have on record. If it's new, it's tweeted.

Why?

Base Creative Agency listens to a lot of music during the day, and I thought it would be fun to share our musical tastes.

How?

• @wearebase uses iTunes to scrobble music with Last.fm.
• Every minute, the crontab kicks in and parses Last.fm's 'recent tracks' feed.
• The script then compares when the last track was played (if at all, it may well be the first time), and if this track has been played since, it's tweeted.
• The message is then inserted into the database, so in just under a minute's time, we can determine whether any new tracks have been played.

Prerequisites:

1. tweepy - an python library for the Twitter API.
2. MySQLdb - a python MySQL db API.
3. feedparser - a python based RSS & Atom feed parser.

Installation:

First of all, ensure your apt-get list is up-to-date by performing a sudo apt-get update.

Next, change the username in the Twadio arg to your Last.fm username, seen here:

twadio = Twadio(username='wearebase')

Installing tweepy:

1. cd into your src directory, such as ~/src.
2. git clone git://github.com/joshthecoder/tweepy.git && cd tweepy
3. python setup.py install && sudo python setup.py install

Installing MySQLdb:

1. sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb
2. mysql -uroot -p and create our database.
3. mysql -uroot -p DATABASE_NAME < sql/schema_20110318.sql

Installing feedparser

1. Return to your src directory.
2. svn checkout http://feedparser.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ feedparser && cd feedparser
3. python setup.py build && sudo python setup.py install

Installing the crontab

1. crontab -e
2. Paste the crontab line, you may need to change the path to the python file.
3. Write and exit, if you are in Vim, use :wq. You can verify it's saved via crontab -l.