A beginning
Years ago, at the dawn of business computing, I was executing mail merges using Microsoft Word and Excel. Understanding the line and page breaks took time, irritation and got me hooked on the idea that we could create something useful out of raw data.
The formatting was separate from the data, and you could tweak and learn as you went.
Now, I’m using a Hugo Static Website along with a DuckDB database and more than a little Python for data munging.
The result is a website that tracks plays of holiday music on a regular basis. Updating the pages and data is very quick, and it’s just a matter of time to fill in the gaps with more detail.
But Why Holiday Music
Every year, several radio stations flip their formats hard right around the middle of November. By the time Thanksgiving in the United States is here, they’re fully loaded for the holly and ivy crowd.
I love Christmas music. The standards are standard for a reason. They delicious. And they’re awfully repetitious.
How repetitious? Well, that’s part of the point of this site - identify all of the artists and they songs, clean up all the cruft and tell a bit of a story using data.
Oh, yeah, and this is an exercise for the Tiger Tail platform.