TMBG API

This is an API created to retrieve information related to the alternative rock group They Might Be Giants from their wiki, tmbw.net. Some of the work on the Album endpoint was done this week.

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Inspiration

They Might Be Giants is an alternative rock group formed in Brooklyn in 1982 by John Linnell and John Flansburgh. This band has a pretty active and comprehensive wiki, This Might Be A Wiki (https://tmbw.net/wiki/Main_Page). I noticed sometime last year, when I was first learning about APIs, that there are few APIs designed for specific musical artists. I decided to change that.

What it does

This API allows users to search for information related to They Might Be Giants. Specifically, the Shows endpoint returns a list of live shows that the band played during a specific year, and the Album endpoint returns some information about one of their releases. These endpoints can be tested using a Flask app included on the GitHub repo.

How we built it

The API is built using Python and Beautiful Soup for crawling and scraping data from certain pages on This Might Be A Wiki.

Challenges we ran into

I am still working out following links from the tables of shows and albums to a page that contains more information about the selected item that I would like to show the users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is my first API (I started working on it over a year ago) and my first dive into Flask.

What we learned

I am learning how to crawl and scrape a webpage with an HTML table using Beautiful Soup, build out an API with different endpoints, and deploy an API on a Flask app.

What's next for TMBG API

I have plans to continue to build out the Shows and Album endpoints, as well as add new endpoints like Song.

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