ReplaceYourselfWithABot.md

How To Replace Yourself With A Bot

Procedure

1. Review what a twitter bot is
2. Create a low-tech bot
3. Cover a basic bot script/system
4. Break into groups/teams to work on bots

#What is a twitter bot?

• Automated posts on the Twitter microblogging service.
• Yes - some are spam to entice clicks. Others post @replies or automatically retweet in response to tweets that include a certain word or phrase.
• 24% of tweets that are on Twitter? source: Mashable
• new art form
• internet as poetry
• experimental, weird, community

Bot styles

Chatbot, datamining, markov chains, visual generation, text generation, mashup/text remixing, scheduled tweets, response bots...

#Some Twitter bots

• All bots by Darius Kazemi
• Big Ben by Jonathan Marchant
• Alicia Winderland by Lee Tusman
• story of glitch by thricedotted
• Pentametron by Rhanjit Bhatnagar
• Deleuze and Guattari
• GreatArtBot by Anthony Prestia
• Babelling Borges
• Two Headlines by Darius Kazemi
• Everyword by Allison Parrish
• Stealth Mountain by Jason Eppink
• Your Title Sucks/The Answer Is No by Jason Eppink

Bot Approaches / Low Tech v. High Tech

Low Tech

• Start With a Concept
• Find/write/develop your text
• You type out your tweets in advance.
• You use a scheduler like Hootsuite, Buffer or Botize. Or a simple script/program like IFTTT.

High Tech

• Using cronjobs
• cron is a daemon, meaning it starts once and stays dormant until it is needed (a web server is also a daemon. it waits for a user to type in the url to load.)

Register a new twitter name/handle

• Note: You can make many accounts under same email address if you use YourEmail+NewTwitterHandle@gmail.com for example (you can do this while using private browse so you can have mulitple accounts open at once)
• Verify via email after making new account

Register a new app on twitter & get access tokens/keys

• Go to https://apps.twitter.com/
  • You need to register a phone number (arrrgh) if not already done. Must be unique!
• Create new app
• Go to Keys and Access Tokens tab
• Access Level should be: Read and write
• At bottom of page click the button to generate access tokens

Getting started With twitter in Python

• We'll be installing tweepy to access twitter in Python
• Open the command line/terminal shell and run this in Bash

Linux

sudo apt-get install python-pip

OR

Mac

sudo easy_install pip #if not already installed
pip install virtualenv
pip install tweepy

Create your python bot

• Example script such as scriptname.py
• Add your access tokens and keys
• Test it in your terminal with python scriptname.py

Sign up on digital ocean

• DigitalOcean is a virtual private server
• You create droplets aka virtual (cloud) servers
• Sign up for an Ubuntu server
• You will be emailed an ip address, etc, prompted to change emails
• Log in

Login via ssh

Steps are here

Connect to your server via ssh

Steps are here

Upload Your Script

• You can upload to your server with scp

scp <path/to/file/on/your/computer> <username>@<hostname>:<destination path>

for example

scp /Users/2sman/Documents/code/github\ projects/Gamelan_Ebooks/gamelan* admin@45.55.87.237:~

Re-install what you need on remote

Getting started With twitter in Python

• We'll be installing tweepy to access twitter in Python
• Install pip on digitalocean server to root

apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-pip
pip install tweepy

Create a cronjob

• first you need to add cron

sudo apt-get install cron

• Run crontab -e and you may have to select nano (2) as your editor
• Add to bottom 0 * * * * python script.py to have it run once an hour

Additional things/links

• Corpora available to use