Building Robots (for World Domination)

Image (cc) Cameron Daigle

I happened to chance upon the brilliant Twitter bot @doskvolscores and it prompted me to start thinking about bots and automation.

I had been playing with some of the old automation stuff the blog was set up with long ago; it seems the feed aggregators are mostly gone, as RSS has gone out of fashion, but the feeds are still going strong. They're what power a lot of the links in the sidebar as well as the blogroll, so I started seeing what I could do with them.

I found my very old Twitter account - and managed to remember enough to reset the password to gain access - to use for a bot.  IFTTT leverages many APIs (it seems) to pass data to social media, amongst many other things, so I'm testing whether this post makes it to it now!

Check out how well it's working here:

• Twitter: @plaspoly

Hopefully I'll get the time to repurpose my Twitter account to run a bot.  Initially I want to build on the Doskvol Scores bot code I found to post results from the blog's various random generators, but Tracery looks such fun for recursive randomised string creation that I'd love to try some procedural character generators - and learn enough Python for the bot to be able to field and reply to requests:

"@plaspoly roll me a d&d character"

"You are a [Gnome] [Barbarian] who [hungers to avenge [the theft of [your people's ancestral lands] by [an elder god cult]]..."

Any advice? Thoughts? Comments always gratefully received.