Category: humour

Blepbot update: Hashtags

I did follow up on on of the possible improvements to the BlepBot in my last post. Mastodon has some fun day-specific tags for animal pics. I decided to use #TongueOutTuesday and #FurballFriday, since almost all the bleps are furry creatures.

# if it's Tuesday, add TongueOutTuesday hashtag
todays_date=datetime.datetime.now()
if todays_date.strftime("%w")=='2':
    post_text+=" #TongueOutTuesday"
elif todays_date.strftime("%w")=='5':
    post_text+=" #FurballFriday"

I also wanted to use a couple of cat-specific ones, but only on pictures of cats! To do that, I use re.search to regex search the post text for “cat” (case-insensitively).

elif todays_date.strftime("%w")=='3':
    if re.search("cat",post_text,re.IGNORECASE):
        post_text+=" #WhiskersWednesday"
elif todays_date.strftime("%w")=='6':
    if re.search("cat",post_text,re.IGNORECASE):
        post_text+=" #Caturday"

Of course, we need to import datetime and re to use these:

from mastodon import Mastodon
import os,random,logging,datetime, re

The blepbot code is in github as a public template: https://github.com/nroshak/blepbot. Feel free to clone it and make it your own!

Blep!

Creating a Mastodon bot in Python

Bleps always cheer me up, so I decided to create a Mastodon bot that posted one blep a day. (A blep is a picture of an animal with a tiny bit of its tongue sticking out, and Mastodon is a decentralized alternative to Twitter.)

Creating a Mastodon bot in Python was surprisingly easy, thanks to the Mastodon.py library. I’ve documented all the steps here, along with links to tutorials for each library or builtin feature that I used.

Have you created any Mastodon or Twitter bots? Let me know in the comments!
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