#

@tilde_fortune twitter bot

Mon Oct 13 15:51:02 UTC 2014

In the end it was too easy to set this up. THANKS UNIX. I was planning to have to learn (more) python and choose a python Twitter library etc but in the end I just used TTYtter.pl called from a shell script. I even got to use TR(1) to strip newlines, woo-hoo!

So the bot is made up of:

• TTYtter.pl in my ~/bin directory
• shortfortune, a shell script that does this:

  fortune -n 140 -s

• tweet_fortune, a shell script that does this:

  shortfortune | tr '\n' ' ' | TTYtter.pl > /dev/null 2>&1

• a cron job that runs tweet_fortune every 20 minutes

It's a demonstration of the power of the Unix Philosophy of small well-defined tools that can be joined together easily.

Tweeting fortunes is fun but I'm thinking about creating a better source of tweets:

• Tweetable quotes about tilde.club from articles about it?
• Tweetable quots from pages on tilde.club, with links to the pages
• User-submitted (anonymized) bash.org style quotes from IRC/Wall?