A little more fun with web apps
Feb. 20, 2021
Read time: 1 minutes and 37 seconds.
tags:Web app fun
Similar to the last post about web apps, i’ve found another similar source of data from taylor.rest which includes a source for the images. Although I couldn’t get the images to render in the web app because of imgur’s limitations in render within a web app without an API key, I decided to take a different bootstrapping approach.
Web Scraping
So the images didn’t work out but no need to fret because I can rip off a similar approach used in the Kanye West I didn’t bring much attention to and that was how the images in the app were sourced from Getty Images. Here is the original script which works as follows:
You first go to the url (read_html), you then select the specific item class using a css selector (html_nodes) and you then grab the source of the item (html('src')), which in this case is the image link.
In the context of Taylor Swift, the code might look something like:
#Loading the Taylor images from getty images
'https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/taylor-swift?family=editorial&phrase=taylor%20swift&sort=mostpopular' %>%
read_html %>%
html_nodes(
'body > div.content_wrapper > section > div > main > section > div.search-content__gallery-pager-wrapper > div > div.search-content__gallery > div > div > div.search-content__gallery-assets > div > article > a > figure > img'
) %>%
html_attr('src') -> ts_imgs
On github, you can final committed changes here of Taylor’s images.
Tay’s Wisdom
The best part, because of using github for hosting code is to leverage information as a way to save time in development. Here is the Taylor Swift github repo if you’d like to check it out. If you’re new to development, I recommend checking out bot the Taylor Swift repository and the Kanye West repository.
The function and simplicity of the application is designed for fun and nothing more. It takes a real world application of accessing website services and giving them front-end utility.
Curious about the code?
Check out my github where I have the code posted for deploying and developing the application locally. Create issues, forks or pull requests letting me know what you think or how you might want to improve the end result again !