Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest albums of all time in Spotify

In September 2020 Rolling Stone magazine published a list with the 500 greatest albums of all time. The list was created by artists, producers, critics, and people from the music industry.

On a lazy afternoon I made a script that creates a sortable list of these albums with links to Spotify. This is the only list you need if you want to explore new music. Sorry, I meant old music of course. There’s a histogram of release years at the bottom. The albums are predominantly from a few decades ago.

Thanks to the developers of spotipy. Enjoy! Continue reading “Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest albums of all time in Spotify”

Convert gedcom to html with bootstrap, d3 and jquery using python

What did the life of my grandfather look like? Did he have siblings? Who were his parents? I had many question and on one of these Sunday afternoon I decided to go for it. I tried some genealogy websites and offline programs and selected Gramps. I found my grandfather into some of those websites that have digitized family records and started filling my database with ancestors, aunts, great aunts. I found that my grandfather had a small brother who died at the age of 3 and that his mother died of Spanish flu.

And then the moment came to share the result with my family, the ones that are still alive. I tried a few html generators but they all looked fairly old fashioned. Therefore I wrote one myself: gedcom2html. Gedcom is a (or the) standard for genealogy files. Gedcom2html uses d3 sunbursts for an ancestor and descendant fan chart. It uses d3 force simulation for a graph of all individuals in the gedcom file.

An example says more than words. So have a look at the family tree of the Dutch Royal Family  You can convert a gedcom file to html yourself using my script on github: gedcom2html

Unfortunately the solution doesn’t scale. It works excellent for a gedcom file with a few hundred individuals. But with a larger gedcom file (>2000) the html files explode to 500 kB each. The script should be improved by moving functionality from the server (python) to the client (javascript). All data should be in a single json file and be read by the JS script. To be fixed during a future picnic.