I’ve been working on a project with Rick from Feed.Us involving a twitterbot which resulted in mkefood, and now nycfood and winetweets. He’s wrapped things into this little site called twitterbotting.com where you can learn more.
Rick originally asked me about some twitter coding a while back, and I mentioned what I had done with twitter for BarCampMilwaukee2, but then I got busy and nothing happened. Finally he bugged me again and pointed me to Anatomy of a Twitter Bot by Whitney McNamara and since I’m a Perl nerd, I was in…
Sadly, it took me way too long to go through the code and change what I wanted, and when I finally did, and had it all running on my home server, I tried to move it to a GoDaddy account which was total fail for so many reasons. GoDaddy’s cheap accounts are ok for simple web sites, but not for running more complex code.
So I ended up putting on my server, where it sits for now. It’s a Perl/MySQL application, which runs via cron every X minutes. There’s a table to allow you to add more accounts so it can run multiple twitterbots (so far we’ve got mkefood, nycfood, and winetweets.) I’m not 100% sure how it will scale, and I’ve found one bug already where it dies if an account has no replies (which is fixable by sending a reply to an account, but it should be fixed in the code as well.)
Next to do… clean up the code a bit, package it up, and release it. I’ll try to do that soon. If you don’t see it in a week or so, bug me and I’ll bump it up on my to do list…