basic setup - Super n00b - help needed

Hi Everyone, I am going to be honest...I love the idea of learning python but I've got a project at work that is needing this software - and I've got very little experience with python, environments - I'm typically comfortable in PHP, javascript, HTML, CSS...I am trying to learn as fast as I can but I was wondering if I can ask a couple stupid questions:

What I've done so far: I can run tipboard just fine. The dashboard comes up great.
My project using tipboard: connect to a Cisco ISE API, filter/parse xml results, and push it to the tiles in tipboard.

1. Can someone point me in the direction on how to automatically have tipboard query the API for realtime numbers? I don't even know where to put my commands and/or python scripts. I did try to learn from the documentation. I'm sorry - I just learn slow.

2. Can tipboard startup automatically without me having to log in to the machine it's installed on?

I would honestly include my sad python script to query the API in python - but currently, it only works if I do a curl command in terminal. The curl request works wonderfully using the tipboard API...i just don't know how to make that call automatically...cronjob? Or, does tipboard have it's own way?

I'll stop here...thank you for your time.