unconf-bot

Follow the steps below to create a Twitter bot that retweets tweets with your unconference's hashtag! Note: you will need access to a server that can run a job. These instructions work for Linux servers. For Windows, see this post.

Step 1: Create a Twitter account for your unconf

You'll need a phone number and an email to do this.

Step 2: Create a Twitter developer account for your unconf's Twitter account

developers.twitter.com

You have to answer some questions about what you will be using your developer account for. Confirm with email before moving onto the next step.

Step 3: Create a Twitter app in your new developer account

Twitter apps

You'll have to answer more questions and agree to Twitter's policies.

Step 4: Clone this repo

This repo contains all the files necessary to Tweet from R! Thanks @ellisp! You'll need the following R packages:

install.packages(c("tweeteR", "stringi", "dplyr", "base64enc")))
devtools::install_github("hadley/emo")

Step 5: Put credentials in the credentials setup file

To find these credentials: Developer twitter -> "Details" button next to your app -> Keys and Tokens

(Optional) Step 5.5: Customize your retweets

Edit retweetRstats.R to change the comment that get posted with the retweet. (Currently emoji!)

Step 6: Set up the bot to run on a schedule. (This step is different for Windows.)

Set up a job on a server to run the shell scripts (scripts will also need to be changed if you're on Windows) in the cron-scripts folder. There is a different script for each Twitter task. For example, to run the retweet script every 5 minutes, put

*/5 * * * * ~/unconf-bot/cron_scripts/retweet

in the crontab file.

Credit to Rrobot

A twitterbot that tweets about #rstats

This is the source code for @HappyRrobot, an inoffensive Twitter bot that tweets a few times each day something about R. Typical tweets are retweets of popular recent posts using the #rstats hashtag, babble based on classic books about R, and text mining summaries from blogs about R.

Read my creators' blog post about when I was born.