yoyo

Uses the Twitter API to automatically change your Twitter profile picture on a schedule (e.g. every hour).

Prerequisites

• Node.js installed on your system. Node.js runs on many platforms. If you do not have it installed, you can Google How to install Node.js on X where X is your platform (Ubuntu, Windows, etc)

• Twitter API credentials for your account. If you do not have API credentials for your account, you can follow the instructions here: http://blog.igalvez.net/generating-twitter-api-credentials/

Setup instructions

• Copy all the source code to your system. You can clone using Git, or by downloding and extracting the source .ZIP file: https://github.com/iglvzx/yoyo/archive/master.zip

• Create a file called credentials.js in the main source folder. Then enter and save the following content, while filling in your corresponding API credentials in place of each REPLACE_ME:

exports.credentials = {
    consumer_key: 'REPLACE_ME',
    consumer_secret: 'REPLACE_ME',
    access_token: 'REPLACE_ME',
    access_token_secret: 'REPLACE_ME'
};

• Create a folder called images in the main source folder. Put all the .JPG, .JPEG, .PNG, and/or .GIF files you want the script to use in that folder.

• The structure of the yoyo source code should now look like this:

images/
    image1.png
    image2.png
    image3.png
    ...
node_modules/
credentials.js
yoyo.js

Running the script

You should now be able to run the script by simply running the following command when inside the main source code folder:

node yoyo.js

The script will start automatically changing your profile picture to a randomly selected image in the images folder ever hour. If you want to have your profile change at different intervals, you can edit the following line in the yoyo.js file:

var cronTime = '0 * * * *';

For example you can change it to the following, to have it run every 20 minutes:

var cronTime = '*/20 * * * *';

This uses the Cron time format to set how often or when your profile picture will be changed. More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron

Example Usage

I run yoyo on my Ubuntu server and I utilize the screen command to keep yoyo running in the background.

• screen -S yoyo to create a new session for yoyo.
• cd yoyo to nagivate to the yoyo folder.
• node yoyo.js to start yoyo

Then I can press CTRL + A + D to detach the yoyo session and leave the script running.

If I want to check the yoyo session again, I can attach it by running screen -r yoyo.