Dropbox shared music folder --> Tumblr music blog. Tumbox generates a blog post for each new album added to your shared folder.

Motivation: You participate in a Dropbox shared folder in which music albums are shared frequently. You usually leave some sort of text or .rtf file with the albums to describe what they are - right now nothing will happen without some sort of info file - I will make it possible to blog without one soon. You want a record of what's been shared and/or want to be able to notify members when a new album is posted and/or want to show people outside your shared folder a glimpse of what is being shared. You kind of want to prove that this can all be done without renting any server space, just by using Dropbox.

Setup:

1. Fill out the config file (from the example) as fits your needs. Afterwards you must rename it to tumboxconfig.py

2. Set up tumbox-bot to run as a cron job; recommended that you run every half hour.

(One day there will be an installation script....)

Expected 'usage' is a folder where albums are periodically added, always in a folder at the top level of your music folder, and always with a text or rtf file ("info file") describing them. Conventionally, there is a line in the info file starting with the string 'Highlights:', and followed by the names of some tracks of interest. The first one matched to a music file in the music folder will be uploaded to the blog. Also by convention the uploader will sign off in a line starting with a '-'. The uploader's name will be added as a tag to the tumblr post and can be used for sorting. Tumbox will also look for cover art included with the file and will upload embed it in the post if found.

Working Example: Music Butt Pirate (caution, slightly nsfw)

What exactly is it doing?: Tumbox leaves behind a tiny hidden file in each of your album folders and uses the contents of that file to determine whether it has already logged that album. Every time it runs it will check to see if there are new albums that it hasn't logged, and if it finds any will generate a blog post, email, and/or text archive of the new posts. At the end of this process it will keep a record of everything it has stored in its database (at time of writing, this is just a json file... sorry I'm not sorry)

Help! I don't know what to do with the config file! Can I see yours?: No, it's full of sensitive info! But feel free to shoot me a message here if you want help setting yourself up

At this time I haven't implemented anything to automatically clean up certain resources that could grow indefinitely. Specifically, the log file will probably start to stack up pretty quickly. Also, hosted preview songs and images will pile up in your Dropbox public folder. You will probably want to delete those. In future versions both of these tasks will be automated