meiosispapers

literature-scanning robot for mastodon and twitter

The repository formerly known as pubmed-rss-twitter is deprecated, and as of 2022-11-11, the accounts on both sites use scripts in this repository.

It can be adapted to any RSS feed by changing the feed source (see run-****-feeds.sh files).

It will work on any Mac or *nix, uses free / open software and does not depend on any proprietary or third-party services. You can customize and curate the output items at will. The principle of operation is:

• fetch the latest feed items as formatted text (using feedstail, a command-line RSS reader)
• change each item into a tweetable blurb (using the perl filter scripts)
• pipe the filtered output into named pipes (see run command below)
• asynchronously send one line at a time to Mastodon and Twitter (using toot, a command-line Mastodon client, and oysttyer, a command-line Twitter client)

Requirements:

• feedstail, an RSS watcher, which you install with pip above
• oysttyer, a command-line twitter client. you will need to create a keyfile to use oysttyer; please see the instructions
• toot, a command-line mastodon client

Howto:

1. Create an account for your papers feed -- important!! check with your mastodon instance to review their bot policy. Do not create bots on instances where they are not allowed and do not flood the timeline.
2. Use pip to install feedstail: pip install feedstail
   • caveat: as of 2022-11-11, feedstail still uses python2 so it may be a headache to get running
3. Install oysttyer and toot from the locations above
4. Make the named pipes "meiotwitter.fifo" and "meiomastodon.fifo" in a suitable place using mkfifo, and edit the scripts meio_tweet.sh and meio_toot.sh to be able to find them
5. Hook the feed-gathering and feed-publishing scripts together as shown below
6. Enjoy your custom firehose of scientific literature

Run command example:

>> . run-mastodon-feeds.sh &
    …feedstail is started and entries get piped into the fifo
>> < meiomastodon.fifo ./meio_toot.sh 
    …lines are read from the fifo and sent by toot to your instance

Notes:

• Now with bioRχiv support!
• Once every few months or so, the bot stops—I have no idea why, but restarting it always fixes it.
• The behavior of feedstail seems to be to always fetch the "newest" items, so stopping and re-starting may result in repeat postings. This behavior can be filtered out in rss-filter.pl if you can figure out a good way.
• TODOs: easier running of the command

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to @caseybergman for the idea and @RobLanfear for sharing implementation details

🐘