Status Day Counters

A Python program for automating writing "Day X of..." on my social media bios. It reads from a central configuration file and proceeds to either interact with official APIs (Spotify, GitHub) or fall back to using Selenium to manually scrape the web application and make the changes (Discord, Instagram).

Note

UPDATE: My other project, status-logger, has been merged into this codebase due to them sharing very similar code. It is available as a subprogram through the --log-discord-status command line switch.

Description: Motivation

Sometimes I want my status to keep track of certain day counts, like "Day X of..." For example, my GitHub bio used to be set up to say "Day X of waiting for HSSEAS to let me in" in wait for the results of my application to switch to Computer Science.

I originally had a few standalone, hard-coded scripts for Discord, Instagram, and Spotify. This project sought to bring them together to one place and make them configurable and extendable.

Configuration: Bio Templates

I placed the configuration file at:

~/.config/counters/bios.json

If it's missing, you should make one at this path. A log file counters.log is also maintained in this directory.

As of now, the bios.json file should conform to the provided schema, bios.schema.json. This is an example file:

{
  "$schema": "../../repos/counters/counters/schema/bios.schema.json",
  "discord": {
    "status": "day {0} of waiting for HSSEAS to let me in",
    "start": "2022-09-26"
  },
  "instagram": {
    "bio": "Day {0} of waiting for happiness.",
    "start": "2022-09-24"
  },
  "spotify": [
    {
      "comment": "main playlist",
      "playlist_id": "5FpuSaX0kDeItlPMIIYBZS",
      "name": "day 0x{0:02X}",
      "description": "day {0} of waiting for HSSEAS to let me in",
      "start": "2022-09-26"
    },
    {
      "comment": "love is war season 4 counter",
      "playlist_id": "2X68da6ouUb9pWYK37QMtR",
      "name": null,
      "description": "day {0} of waiting for kaguya season 4",
      "start": "2022-08-16"
    }
  ],
  "github": {
    "bio": "UCLA CS '24 // T{0} days!",
    "start": "2024-06-15"
  }
}

Notes:

• The strings to display (status, bio, description) can include, but don't need to, a {0} placeholder for where the day number will go. At the moment, the str.format() is applied directly on the template string, meaning you can use format codes the same was you would do in Python code.
  • In the above example, I use "day 0x{0:02X}" to format the number in zero-padded hexadecimal e.g. day 0x0C.
• The start keys are dates to be considered as "Day 1" in the count.
  • You can also use future dates to implement countdowns. Negative counts are returned as they are. In the GitHub example above, I use this trick to write things like T-265 days!.
• For each Spotify playlist entry, you have the option to change either the playlist name, description, or both. Leaving a key as null signifies leaving it unchanged.
• The comment keys are not used nor are they required by the schema. They're just a way to document each playlist entry for yourself.

Usage: Running on Demand

Since this program is meant to automate, it should be hooked up to a scheduler to be run periodically. That way, the statuses on all platforms update automatically, and all you need to do when you want to change the templates is edit the bios.json file.

But for debugging/development purposes, the code can be run on demand with some command line options:

poetry run counters [options]

This project uses Poetry for dependency management. If the above command doesn't work, you probably have not set it up yet:

pip install poetry
poetry install

Options Reference

You can also use the --help flag for the most up-to-date information directly at the command line.

Option	Description
-c/--console	Only output to the console. Do not write to the log file and do not send an email upon failure.
-w/--window	Run the Selenium web scraper in an open browser window instead of headlessly.
-d/--discord	See below.
-i/--instagram	See below.
-s/--spotify	See below.
-g/--github	If any of these 4 switches are included, run these select tasks. Otherwise if all 4 switches are absent from the command line, use the default behavior of running all.
-n/--dry-run	Just load the configuration settings and output the values the program would run with.
-l/--log-discord-status	Log Discord custom status instead of updating counters.

Demo

Here's a screen recording of this program at work. I included the --window and --console flags for demonstration purposes only. The scheduled task runs the package without any command line arguments, so it does not spawn a browser window and logs to the log file instead of to a console.

counters-running-demo.mp4

The Spotify task uses the tekore library to directly communicate with the Spotify Web API instead of using Selenium, so it is not visible in the demo.

And here's a snapshot of the overview of the Task Scheduler task I set up. The full details can be found here.

Example --dry-run output, which uses the rich library for pretty console formatting:

Development: Environment Recovery

See DEVELOPMENT.md.

Development: Implementation Details

See DEVELOPMENT.md