The Painter Goblin: Part 2, Twitter Pieces

Continuing the story of the Painter Goblin and following part one, the idea of a Twitter bot started to form earlier this year.

The Painter Goblin: Part 1, The Zine

In part 2 I take a very brief look at what is needed to write a bot and get it publishing.

Learn more below.

A head start

As I already run four bots, the bare-bones of the Twitter bot were already in place. Their source code repositories are below.

Binary Numbers (updates my Avatar and stores the results in an online gallery).
Manpage-du-Jour (tweets a Linux manpage daily).
RFC du Jour (tweets new RFCs when they appear as well as one historical RFC a day).
OAIS du Jour (tweets updates from the OAIS editorial Wiki).

At the time of writing, each bot ran from Python Anywhere service. Python Anywhere offered a low-barrier hosting mechanism for Python projects with in-built scheduling that could be easily triggered, e.g. for scheduling Tweets.

The Twitter API as discussed in previous blogs is provided by SixOhSix on GitHub.

The neat thing is that it also, already bundled in Python Anywhere and so it doesn’t take any extra work to install it when the code is uploaded to the server.

How to tweet

For those creating a Twitter Bot, it can be run from your regular Twitter account (you could run many!), but in most cases, you’ll want to create a dedicated Twitter account that better identifies the project. For this work, I created the Painter Goblin.

Authenticating your bot

To be able to automate your work Twitter needs to authenticate your code.. To do this we register the app via Twitter’s App Registration.

There are two files the Twitter API by SixOhSix uses to handle authentication with the service. A set of two consumer keys, and a set of two application keys.

With those in place you point the Twitter API to the information and off you go.

Sending a Tweet becomes a two (or see-below, three-step) process.

Create a Twitter object and authenticate
Send the Tweet via your new object

Changes since previous Twitter Bots

The API has changed since the last bot I created. It still has 140 character limits for posts. It also still shortens (or lengthens!) any URL of any length to 22 characters. This needs to be built into a heuristic when dynamically generating text for any Tweet we’re going to make.

A change that has really helped with making a bot is that images no longer count toward the 140 character limit. One less thing to think about! And a bonus for any bots that want to be more visual.

Uploading images

Uploading images is something I haven’t done before. Fortunately the SixOhSix README has a great section on how to ‘Send images along with your tweets’. Interestingly, to send an image with a Tweet is a three-step process, first it requires authentication, and then the image is uploaded to the Twitter dedicated server, which then returns an image key that is then sent with your text.

# Send images along with your tweets:

# - first just read images from the web or from files the regular way:
with open("example.png", "rb") as imagefile:
imagedata = imagefile.read()

# - then upload medias one by one on Twitter's dedicated server
# and collect each one's id:
t_upload = Twitter(domain='upload.twitter.com',
auth=OAuth(token, token_secret, consumer_key, consumer_secret))
id_img1 = t_upload.media.upload(media=imagedata)["media_id_string"]
id_img2 = t_upload.media.upload(media=imagedata)["media_id_string"]

# - finally send your tweet with the list of media ids:
t.statuses.update(status="PTT ★", media_ids=",".join([id_img1, id_img2]))

One issue discovered in testing was that the SixOhSix API versioning on Python Anywhere was behind the most recent code on GitHub – I implemented legacy code to match the versions on the server but I have also implemented the up-to-date mechanism so as to future-proof things a little bit more.

Lessons learned from before

In creating this new code I wanted to make up for a few shortcomings. There were two design decisions I was able to incorporate, namely:

The ability to test Tweets with a –notweet flag.
Improved ability to run code manually.

The latter is a feature I was particularly keen on. While I like the idea of Painter Goblin as an art project, there are times it is nice to be able to run the process manually on special occasions for others, or at their request. Or just for fun to make new art for yourself.

We’ll see how this progresses in future posts as we get into the visual detail of the project.

Botwiki

I mentioned my four twitter bots – you can read more about those on Botwiki but checkout the entire Botwiki Website to learn more about Creating Bots, and learn more about those that already exist and the joy they brought to social media platforms before being unilaterally banned on some of the biggest ones.