Posts tagged: twitter

Back in November after the various developments with Twitter, I worked out how to get my Twitter bot to run on Mastodon. Since the Twitter takeover there have been various announcements from the new owner and official Twitter accounts about free access to the Twitter API being suspended, although these have usually come and gone without said suspension happening.

Two years and one month ago to the day I blogged about setting up the narrowbotr, a Twitter bot that randomly posts locations on the inland waterways network in England & Wales managed by Canal & River Trust. What with everything going on with Twitter at the moment I’ve set myself up on Mastodon, where I’m @mattkerlogue@fosstodon.org, and so why not also migrate the narrowbotr. In this post: Setting up an account Chillin' out, maxin', rtootin' all cool Authenticating the bot Setting up an account There’s more than enough posts and whatnot out there about moving to Mastodon/the fediverse, Danielle Navarro’s blog is particularly good.

Let’s just acknowledge upfront that this is a very strange week to be writing about Twitter posting strategies1. This is the second blog about my coastalwalkr project, you can read the first here. The last post introduced a conceptual evolutionary jump for the mapbotverse — walking — and we’ve seen how in R we might be able to programmatically take a walk along the coast of Great Britain. For humans the walk in and of itself can be the sole purpose of the activity, but a mapbot probably needs something more to keep itself occupied and entertained?

Back in October I developed a twitter bot based on Matt Dray’s londonmapbot. I’ve recently been thinking about other projects that might make good opportunities for learning, and thus blog posts. One idea was for a new addition to the mapbotverse1, which started as just tweeting a random location along the British coastline with maybe some of the same features as the narrowbotR but as I thought about it I wondered whether to make this a slightly more sophisticated bot.

gongoozler [n] a person who enjoys watching boats and activities on canals I’m sure I’m not the first person, and won’t be the last, to remark that 2020 is a very strange year. October 2020 marks five years since I last went on a canal boat holiday. An anniversary that at the outset of this year I had hoped I might have managed to avoid by taking to the water sometime over the summer.