I left the Birdsite about six months ago when the new owner started mucking about.
No regrets! Mastodon has been so much better! I decided to try my hand at creating an automated “robot” to post quotations alongside some of my photographs.
Mastodon is much more civilized and well organized—including best practices for social media bots. There is even a server dedicated to bots called “botsin.space”–so I called my new bot “Wisdom in Space“.
There are many helpful websites to get started. Most use the mastodon interface package for Python. This is the first time I’ve written code in the python language, but fortunately the learning curve isn’t very steep. The biggest conceptual hurdle for me was understanding and using virtual environments on the shared server. Once I got those pesky details worked out I set up a cron job to post every four hours. The quotes are in a tab-delimited text file and the images are in a nearby directory. Note the development code below works locally on my laptop. The directory paths and other details are different on the server. I hope someone finds this useful!
#
# wisdombot 0.2
# quote of the day service for mastodon
# copyright richard rathe 2023
# (cc) attrib-noncomm-share-alike
#
import re
import glob
import random
from mastodon import Mastodon
quote_list = []
with open('wisdom.dat') as file:
for line in file:
line = line[:-1] # remove newline
quote_list.append(line)
qmax = str(len(quote_list))
image_list = glob.glob('images/*.jpg')
imax = str(len(image_list))
qrand = random.randrange(int(qmax))
line = quote_list[qrand]
line = line.replace('—' , '--') # fix entities
line = line.replace('"' , '\"')
line = line.replace('é' , 'e')
line = line.replace('ø' , 'o')
line = line.replace('ö' , 'o')
line = line.replace('&' , '&')
data_list = line.split('\t\t') # double tab delimited
irand = random.randrange(int(imax)) # pick image at random
img = image_list[irand]
match = re.search(r'^images/([a-z0-9-]+)', img, re.I)
if match:
stem = match.group(1)
else:
stem = ''
ikeyw = ''
for i in stem.split('-'):
i = i[0].upper() + i[1:] # capitalize
ikeyw += " #" + i
ikeyw = ikeyw[1:] # nuke leading space
keyw = ''
for i in data_list[2].split('/'): # keywords are '/' delimited
i = i.replace(' ', '')
i = i.replace('-', '')
keyw += " #" + i
keyw = keyw[1:] # nuke leading space
quote = data_list[3]
name = data_list[0] # author name
ntag = re.sub('[^0-9a-zA-Z]+', '', name) # author hashtag
ntag = '#' + ntag
other = data_list[1] # source info (if available)
if other == 'None':
other = '';
else:
other = ' (' + other + ')'
out = quote + '\n -- ' + name + other + '\n\n'
out += '⬆ #Quotes ' + ntag + ' ' + keyw + '\n\n⬇ #Photography ' + ikeyw
if len(out) < 500: # limited to 500 chars
print('\n' + out + '\n')
mastodon = Mastodon(
access_token = 'token.secret',
api_base_url = 'https://botsin.space/'
)
media = mastodon.media_post(img, description="photo by richard rathe")
mastodon.status_post(out, media_ids=[media])
