Playing Around with the iTunes API

Emily Deans
Jul 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Happy Saturday! I’ve passed the blazing sunny morning and stormy afternoon revisiting some of this week’s assignments/lessons and working on the new weekly project.

As we move toward the monthlong back-end immersive that begins next week, we still have a final front-end assignment that’s sort of a culmination of everything we’ve learned in the class so far on the front-end side. The work on this one has been pretty fun so far. We’re working with the iTunes API to create a real app in which you can search your favorite artists and play samples of their songs via your own website. Pretty cool, right?

Current status of my app

This will involve using a bunch of new tools and concepts I haven’t used before so will definitely be a bit of a stretch — but I suppose that’s how you learn/grow! Some of the foreseeable challenges for me are:

Working with the API: while we’ve done a bit of this over the past week, I have yet to personally interact with such a robust, comprehensive database.
Audio: the point of this app is to ultimately be able to click on and play a song directly from my webpage. In addition to not being as familiar with API manipulation as I’d like to be, I’ve also never worked with <audio> tags. Excited to dive into that realm a bit.
Submit: this is an event listener method I’m not as familiar with, but am using in this project to capture a button click in order to update the HTML in response to a user’s input.

So far, I’ve pulled together a pretty fun responsive site (see above) that has some basic, initial styling elements and in which I have successfully utilized ‘fetch’ to connect with the API and pull in artist’s song listings. No audio yet, but I’m going to try to make some headway with that before heading back to class next week.

AND I’m actually going to try to deploy this one, so I’m hoping you’ll be able to play around with it yourself once it’s all done and ready to roll… Have a great weekend!

Song of the Day: “All or Nothing” by Cher (wasn’t it obvious today’s was gonna be a Cher pick?)