Automatically updating the 'about' page with my last.fm top listen
May 23, 2025
I “scrobble” all of my listens to last.fm, which for some reason still exists. You can automatically link Spotify to last.fm to have all of your listens synced there — and for some reason this feature still exists. This is quite nice, because Spotify have deigned that your stats are only available once a year —und exactly vonce a year— in a specially curated selection of statistics. I thought it would be fun to put my top track of the month on the about page, and this proved quite easy to automate with a github workflow.
The script
The python script is here, it’s pretty dumb because I started writing something generalized and then got bored and specialised for this task. You run it, it reads an API key and a username from the env, and it spits out the top track details into…
_config.yml
Jekyll blog engine has a nice little YAML config file, and we can reference the variables within from any of the markdown pages. In particular, the config can contain this:
top_track:
artist: Dire Straits
name: On Every Street
playcount: 33
and the about.md can contain this:
* My most listened track this month is {{ site.top_track.name }} by {{ site.top_track.artist }} ({{ site.top_track.playcount }} listens)
It wouldn’t have been hard to sed the about page directly, but this is much cleaner.
We can read the YAML file into a python object, update it, and write it back.
I didn’t bother making this stable, so it can create some unnecessary churn to the YAML file in the diff, but I don’t really care.
Once Jekyll build runs, the about page is updated with the new values of the variables.
GH workflow
The workflow is straightforward, it just checks out the code, installs the python deps, run the script, then gits the changes into a branch and opens a PR. I’d like to review the PR to start with and make sure it is sensible, and also nuke the PR when it has a truly embarrassing track, but it should be possible to automatically merge this, or otherwise push directly to main. The only potential problem I see pushing to main is getting GH actions to be happy running the Jekyll build so that the site actually updates.