27 lines
3.3 KiB
HTML
27 lines
3.3 KiB
HTML
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layout: post
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title: Twitterbot. No Really, I Need To Be Stopped
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tags:
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- Mono
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created: 1169560301
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---
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Ok, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/agentdero/tags/twitterer/">Twitterer</a> almost had a valid excuse, but this is just bloody unnecessary. I wrote a C# (Mono) news bot for <a href="http://twitter.com">twitter</a> last night out of boreom while waiting for a client to finish writing the webservices needed for my project. The Twitterbot is based <strong>very</strong> loosely on <a href="http://menti.net/?p=85">Mario Menti</a>'s perl source code, in that I took the tinyurl idea (and that's about it). I wrote the bot with the concept in mind of using one bot to manage all the feeds at once, which does have a slightly undesirable affect of posting the updates for all the feeds at once, but with a bit of tweaking that can be lessened.
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The bot is used to run the following twitter-things: <a href="http://twitter.com/googlenews">googlenews</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/googlenewsworld">googlenewsworld</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/googlenewssports">googlenewssports</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/googlenewsus">googlenewsus</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/googlenewsent">googlenewsent</a>
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<h3>the technical details</h3>
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The Twitterbot makes use of <a href="http://rss-net.sourceforge.net/">RSS.NET</a> for all its incoming feed parsing, but uses the standard System.Net.WebRequest class for posting to both <a href="http://twitter.com">twitter</a> and retrieving the proper <a href="http://tinyurl.com">tinyurl</a> link. The basic structure of the bot is simple, whenever it grabs new items it'll check that feed's last (stored internally) items to prevent duplication of twitter-posts, and then will shorten the title, generate the tinyurl link and finally post the tiny message to twitter. One of the issues I discovered with <a href="http://news.google.com">Google News</a> is that they randomize the story providers for any given story, i.e. a they might push out a story to their feeds about China's shooting down of a satellite but each time the bot updates that feed may return a different title for the story from a different news organization. In order to prevent flooding, the bot currently has a twitter-posting maximum of two per iteration, which combined with the update interval (30 minutes) helps cut down on both duplicate stories, but also spamming the living hell out of twitter.
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The file format that the bot reads feeds and twitter information from is also simple:<code>
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<feeds>
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<!-- & -> &amp; -->
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<feed name="Google News" url="http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&amp;topic=h&amp;output=rss" twitter="user" password="pass"/>
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</feeds>
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</code>
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I think I am going to release this as open source in the very near future but I want to check with the twitter guys first to take any steps necessary to prevent spamming their goofy little service. I really think my bot would help organizations use twitter as a minimalistic content delivery platform (market-speak!) if they already spit out content in standard RSS formats elsewhere, but I don't want to step on any toes.
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A nice and neat little Twitterbot, all in less than 300 lines of code :)
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