{"id":9711,"date":"2023-04-14T13:36:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-14T18:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/richard.rathe.org\/?p=9711"},"modified":"2024-09-29T14:36:37","modified_gmt":"2024-09-29T19:36:37","slug":"wisdom-bot-for-mastodon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmangrove.org\/rathe.org\/richard\/2023\/wisdom-bot-for-mastodon","title":{"rendered":"“Wisdom” Bot for Mastodon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I left the Birdsite about six months ago when the new owner started mucking about.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

No regrets! Mastodon<\/a> has been so much better! I decided to try my hand at creating an automated “robot”<\/a><\/em> to post quotations alongside some of my photographs.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Wisdom in Space Posts Every Four Hours<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Mastodon is much more civilized and well organized\u2014including 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<\/a>“.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many helpful websites to get started. Most use the mastodon<\/em> interface package for Python<\/em>. 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<\/em> on the shared server. Once I got those pesky details worked out I set up a cron jo<\/em>b 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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

#\n#\twisdombot 0.2\n#\tquote of the day service for mastodon\n#\tcopyright richard rathe 2023\n#\t(cc) attrib-noncomm-share-alike\n#\n\nimport re\n\nimport glob\n\nimport random\n\nfrom mastodon import Mastodon\n\nquote_list = []\n\nwith open('wisdom.dat') as file:\n\n\tfor line in file:\n\n\t\tline = line[:-1]  # remove newline\n\n\t\tquote_list.append(line)\n\n\nqmax = str(len(quote_list))\n\nimage_list = glob.glob('images\/*.jpg')\n\nimax = str(len(image_list))\n\nqrand = random.randrange(int(qmax))\n\nline = quote_list[qrand]\n\nline = line.replace('&mdash;'  , '--')\t# fix entities\nline = line.replace('&quot;'   , '\\\"')\nline = line.replace('&eacute;' , 'e')\nline = line.replace('&oslash;' , 'o')\nline = line.replace('&ouml;'   , 'o')\nline = line.replace('&amp;'    , '&')\n\ndata_list = line.split('\\t\\t')\t\t# double tab delimited\n\nirand = random.randrange(int(imax))\t# pick image at random\n\nimg = image_list[irand]\n\nmatch = re.search(r'^images\/([a-z0-9-]+)', img, re.I)\n\nif match:\n\tstem = match.group(1)\nelse:\n\tstem = ''\n\nikeyw = ''\n\nfor i in stem.split('-'):\n\ti = i[0].upper() + i[1:]\t# capitalize\n\tikeyw += \" #\" + i\n\nikeyw = ikeyw[1:]\t# nuke leading space\n\nkeyw = ''\n\nfor i in data_list[2].split('\/'):\t# keywords are '\/' delimited\n\ti = i.replace(' ', '')\n\ti = i.replace('-', '')\n\tkeyw += \" #\" + i\n\nkeyw = keyw[1:]\t\t# nuke leading space\n\nquote = data_list[3]\n\nname = data_list[0]\t\t\t\t# author name\n\nntag = re.sub('[^0-9a-zA-Z]+', '', name)\t# author hashtag\nntag = '#' + ntag\n\nother = data_list[1]\t\t\t\t# source info (if available)\n\nif other == 'None':\n\tother = '';\nelse:\n\tother = ' (' + other + ')'\n\nout = quote + '\\n    -- ' + name + other + '\\n\\n'\n\nout += '\u2b06 #Quotes ' + ntag + ' ' + keyw + '\\n\\n\u2b07 #Photography ' + ikeyw\n\nif len(out) < 500:\t\t# limited to 500 chars\n\n\tprint('\\n' + out + '\\n')\n\n\tmastodon = Mastodon(\n\t\taccess_token = 'token.secret',\n\t\tapi_base_url = 'https:\/\/botsin.space\/'\n\t)\n\n\tmedia = mastodon.media_post(img, description=\"photo by richard rathe\")\n \tmastodon.status_post(out, media_ids=[media])\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2014including best practices for social media … Continue reading ““Wisdom” Bot for Mastodon”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,32,18],"tags":[516,515,517,513],"class_list":["post-9711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography","category-programming","category-technology","tag-mastodon","tag-python-programming","tag-quotations","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmangrove.org\/rathe.org\/richard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmangrove.org\/rathe.org\/richard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmangrove.org\/rathe.org\/richard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmangrove.org\/rathe.org\/richard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmangrove.org\/rathe.org\/richard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9711"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/redmangrove.org\/rathe.org\/richard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10151,"href":"https:\/\/redmangrove.org\/rathe.org\/richard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9711\/revisions\/10151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmangrove.org\/rathe.org\/richard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmangrove.org\/rathe.org\/richard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmangrove.org\/rathe.org\/richard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}