wayback_exe

This is the code for wayback_exe, a bot that renders images of old web pages from the Wayback Machine and posts them to Twitter and Tumblr.

This is my first project in node.js and probably has all sorts of awful issues that should be cleaned up. Sorry about that!

The bot is written in node and includes a few pieces:

• scraper.js -- this script indexes old web pages in the Wayback Machine. It looks for URLs to scrape, queues them up in a redis store, and stores some details about the page itself in a MySQL database.

• bot.js -- loads a random page from the MySQL database, generates a screenshot of it via PhantomJS, and then fits that screenshot into an image of an old browser via ImageMagick. Then it sends the image to Twitter and Tumblr.

• pages.js - code for adding pages to MySQL, and getting them out later.

• queue.js - code for managing the scraper queue with Redis

• A bunch of random utility scripts/etc.

Running the bot

If you want to run a version of this bot, these steps should get you started:

• copy conf.json.example to conf.json
• create a Twitter account and authorize it, and put the credentials in conf.json
• create a MySQL database with the script in setup.sql. Add the login info to the config.
• setup Redis and add the credentials to the config
• run npm install to install dependencies
• Add some interesting URLs to Redis like so:

  nodejs add-url.js http://www.cool-old-site.com/

or load the contents of a JSON array of URLs into redis:

  nodejs add-urls.js urls.json > tmp && cat tmp | redis-cli --pipe

Run the scraper! I'm lazy, and currently run it like this in a terminal window:

  echo "var s= require('./scraper.js'); s.loop()" | nodejs;

Let it run for awhile. It will scrape pages, store the results to MySQL, and add more URLs to index to Redis. Eventually, you can send a tweet like so:

  node bot.js