One of my favorite music columns of the past several years is The Number Ones on Stereogum. The column is reviewing every single Billboard Hot 100 Number of Hit of all time. I was looking through my contacts and thought it would be nice to know what someone’s #1 Birthday Song was, because that is the type of person I am (mine was Blondie’s “Call Me” – Tom Breihan gave it a 10/10).
I thought it would be interesting to have that available for my friends and other network folks, but I would never want to manually add that information. So using rvest, I threw together a script that takes a csv downloaded from google contacts, finds every entry with a complete birth date (month, date, and year), and adds a custom field with the song’s name and title. This data is then exported to a new csv.
One then needs to make a minor edit to the header so that it looks like the next image (the single “.”s need to be replaced with a ” ” and a the “…”s need to be replaced with a ” – “). Then the file can be re-imported into google contacts. You then need to run “merge and fix” on all of these “new” contacts and voila you now can tell your friends what their #1 Birthday Song is.
The script is available here.