This is the first entry in a blog series I’ll be calling ‘Retrospective’. This series will take a look at previous projects that I’ve worked on, discussing what the project is, how it works, and a bit about the development process.

Today, I’ll be talking about the Inspiration Bot - a Twitter Bot that posts inspirational quotes.

inspirationbot

Inspiration

During the time I wrote the Inspiration Bot, I was toying around with Python, going through a few of the exercises from the Automate The Boring Stuff book. I was particularly interested in the idea of web scraping, so I set out to find a way to build something that uses scraped data ripped from some online source.

Eventually the idea of posting inspirational quotes came to mind. This idea felt like it came with a lot of pros:

  • Sharing inspirational quotes is a nice way to spread positivity
  • Quotes are of a String format (easy to scrape)
  • People would likely want to share inspirational quotes via Social Media share/retweet

Twitter seemed like the right platform for this due to the type of content I’d be dealing with. Also, I took on a “mini challenge” of trying to grow the account (follower-wise) as much as possible. One way that I thought would help would be to include a random hashtag onto every post, allowing for more potential viewers of the tweets.

How it Works

Inspiration Bot was made up of two Python scripts, incorporating use of BeautifulSoup (for web scraping) and Tweepy (for Twitter API interactions). Here’s a breakdown of the responsibilities, ripped directly from the Github README:

quoteGrabberBot.py:

  • Uses BeautifulSoup to scrape HTML from goodreads.com
  • Parse out 30 quotes per page, for 100 pages (Starting URL)
  • Filters out quotations that are not Twitter friendly (> 140 characters)
  • Appends quotations to quotes.txt

inspirationBot.py:

  • Establishes connection to Twitter API via Tweepy
  • Reads in quotes.txt generated by quoteGrabberBot.py
  • Generates a tweet (in the format “Quote + Hashtag”) and sends tweet to Twitter
  • Continues to tweet every 30 minutes until no more tweets available or Keyboard Interrupt
  • On Keyboard Interrupt, unused tweets rewritten to quotes.txt

Outcome

Overall, I’d say that the Inspiration Bot was a success. While I did not keep it running actively for too long, I was able to grow the follower count to just over a 1000 users, and there were consistent retweets.

Next time, I’d like to incorporate a better way to handle the ongoing job of posting the tweets by automating the execution of inspirationBot.py (as opposed to my approach of leaving my terminal running all day). This could probably be done via a cron job or through deploying the bot to a service like Heroku.