Tag: bash

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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What’s in a name? or rather, in the SSA Names data

One of the amazing things about being a DBA/developer in 2016 is the sheer amount of freely available, downloadable data to play with. One fun publicly available data sets is the American Social Security Administration names data. It contains all names for which SSNs were issued for each year, with the number of occurrences (although names with <5 occurrences are not included to protect individual privacy).

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