Goce Mitevski

Custom Single Page Application for the Dragan Gjakonovski – Shpato – Digital Catalog (Драган Ѓаконовски – Шпато – Дигитален каталог). Built with custom JavaScript (JS) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the SPA enables an interactive presentation of the music catalog, by linking each song to an existing YouTube video. The users are allowed to filter the data based on different filters, such as “Just songs with recordings” or “Just new”.

Custom Python scripts were written for data normalization, asset building and minification, YouTube video discovery, and graphic asset generation.

The project is hosted on GitHub via GitHub Pages, and deployment is fully automated.

Dragan Gjakonovski – Shpato – Digital Catalog (Драган Ѓаконовски – Шпато – Дигитален каталог) is a personal project that uses data from Vančo Dimitrov’s monograph “Dragan Gjakonovski – Shpato: Muzička legenda” (Skopje, 2010).

About Dragan Gjakonovski

Dragan Gjakonovski – Shpato (1931–1987) is considered the founder of Macedonian jazz and popular music.

He never finished music school – he found jazz on foreign radio and taught himself arranging by transcribing the records he admired. At seventeen he wrote “Na igranka” (At a dance), which the Skopje Jazz Festival would later call the first Macedonian jazz composition. In 1961 he formed and conducted the Big Band of Macedonian Radio Television. He left more than 3,000 arrangements, and songs like “Molči edna dolina” and “Leni” are still performed today.