Jun 15, 2018

Adrien Joly - Jekyll as a replacement of Spotify

Revue

Adrien Joly

June 15 · Issue #43 · View online

Every week, I share a side-project I made in 1 day.

Hi there!

As I had forecasted, my new job has been very demanding in terms of time and energy, so I invested more time maintaining my existing side projects (e.g. Openwhyd, Next Step for Trello, js-test, pdfreader…) rather than creating new ones.

That being said, I’m taking the opportunity of my short vacation in Palma de Mallorca to tell you about my latest creation: a creative use of the data-based static page generator supported by Github pages: Jekyll.

Note: this issue is a enriched version of the article I posted on hashnode: https://hashnode.com/post/did-you-find-or-create-something-cool-june-2018-cji8hu4pw0000l9vpzig2uobf

album-shelf

As a music lover, I love keeping a beautiful collection of music albums.

But collecting vinyl discs is not my thing, and I don’t like the fact that Spotify mixes all the tracks of my “saved” albums with the tracks I carefully hand-picked as individual “saved” tracks.

So, after years of accumulating albums as Spotify playlist, making them now unbrowsable, I decided to create my own album collection outside of Spotify.

Meet adrienjoly.com/album-shelf

Like for most my side projects, I did not want to maintain and host a new backend, so I decided to make it a static list that would render to nice-looking HTML (with cover art), using Jekyll data files, templates and Github pages for (free) hosting.

It’s still work in progress but you can see the resulting here: https://adrienjoly.com/album-shelf/

And the source code there: https://github.com/adrienjoly/album-shelf/blob/master/README.md

I also created a v0.1 release that anyone can use as a boilerplate to create a new list-based static web page using Jekyll and that can be hosted directly on Github pages. So feel free to fork it, it may save you some time and trouble!

Enjoy your weekend!