Panurgy NodeRadio

A mostly-useless demo app that collects the songs played by various radio stations.

Setup

The following back-end services are needed to get things up and running:

• A MongoDB server. This works with MongoLab or a Local MongoDB install.
• Before running the Node app, make sure your shell/environment has the variable DB_URL assigned to the MongoDB URL. Such as:

DB_URL=mongodb://dbuser:dbpasswd@aserver.mongolab.com:someport/instanceName

• The database needs two collections: stations and songHistory.

• Since this is a lame demo, there isn't an interactive Station Definition editor (yet). Thus, in that Mongo Database, create a collection named stations, and manually add a JSON document/record like this:

{
    "active": "prod",  // only 'prod' records are polled
    "callsign": "KQRS",
    "currentSong": {
        "curl": {
            "url": "http://www.92kqrs.com/common/nowplaying/get_nowplaying_json.php?callback=x&calls=KQRSFM&now_playing=true&_=1393385576460",
            "headers": {
                "Pragma": " no-cache",
                "Host": " www.92kqrs.com",
                "Accept-Language": " en-US,en;q=0.8",
                "User-Agent": " Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.63 Safari/537.36",
                "Accept": " text/javascript, application/javascript, application/ecmascript, application/x-ecmascript, */*; q=0.01",
                "Referer": " http://www.92kqrs.com/",
                "X-Requested-With": " XMLHttpRequest",
                "Cookie": " PHPSESSID=34dkiusesjbsg3b17psoh6s2g2; nlbi_51075=BL81H1fxJS87Evv8i0Na8wAAAABjXmBnaEUtY2Cvmq2rwx7I; visid_incap_51075=YjiTQZTMSryemVZQDblU2VhnslIAAAAAQUIPAAAAAACc3ybvUVfBdM2dwnhjkk29; incap_ses_104_51075=a36qCA3X1UapD4is8HtxAVlnslIAAAAA3vuK5m/9koIZYPxn61lo6w==; _trp_hit_6647/10259_160x600=3; _trp_hit_6647/10259_300x250=2; __gads=ID=8e1306178e63dba6:T=1387423584:S=ALNI_MbGrQBaujvFL6hJ94FMxuNQpHoinQ; _trp_hit_6647/10259_728x90=3; __utma=110782170.1658551907.1387423591.1387423591.1387423591.1; __utmb=110782170.1.10.1387423591; __utmc=110782170; __utmz=110782170.1387423591.1.1.utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=(not%20provided)",
                "Connection": " keep-alive",
                "Cache-Control": " no-cache"
            }
        },
        "songName": "nowplaying.title",
        "artist": "nowplaying.artist"
    }
}

• The property currentSong contains the information used to poll the station's website for the currently playing song information.
• The curl property contains all of the client/browser headers to send (to make the request look like a "legit" browser - some stations use API gateway software to block automated requests)
• The songName property defines the properties to traverse in the response in order to obtain the current song name/title.
• The artist property defines the properties to traverse in the response in order to obtain the current artist.

For more info

Check out my blog for more (or less) useful info about this app/demo.