rococodogs / HistoricalCats

twitter bot posting links to cats found via the Digital Public Library of America platform

@HistoricalCats

the code that runs a bot tweeting random cat-related items in the Digital Public Library of America. this is a rewrite of the original PHP code written in 2014 at LibHack in Philadelphia.

remixing / running on yr own

I tried to set this up so that this could be cloned + remixed as easily as possible. After cloning / remixing:

• the .env file will need to contain your DPLA API key, your twitter credentials, and a secret key that you create.
• the app-config.js file contains things pertinent to your bot including: prefixed phrases, emoji, item title max-length, and the amount of items to keep track of so your bot doesn't run the risk of posting the same thing.

note, these files also contain this information + more in their respective comments.

getting it to tweet

so, this is a little annoying, but in order for this bot to tweet, you have to poke it by means of a POST request with a special header. this is so visitors to your endpoint don't cause your bot to get flagged by twitter and/or dpla. the beauty of this glitch thing is that you can easily rewrite the stuff in server.js to trigger a tweet whenever you want!

I have a cron job scheduled to send a curl request to this app with the special header running 3 times a day from a linode server.

so if, say, process.env.SECRET_TOKEN_VALUE === 'hi there! ^_^, then:

curl -X POST -H "x-tweet-me-maybe: hi there! ^_^" https://yr-app-here.glitch.com/tweet

would trigger a tweet.

you can also use a third-party server-checking service to poke yr app! see the handy glitch/twitterbot project for suggestions

• tips!

questions?

leave an issue or tweet me.