@ShowdownBot is a generative Twitter bot using Tracery, built with Glitch.
I recently made a few similar bots with Tracery — @WordsofMcCarthy and @StinkpieceBot — with the aid of Cheap Bots, Done Quick. This time around, I wanted to open up the hood, tinker around with the code, and experiment with Glitch as a botmaking platform.
Glitch
Glitch is a free app-building platform and community. You can think of Glitch as Google Docs for programming.
With Glitch, you can host an app, bot, or site, invite collaborators. You can copy fully working apps and edit them to your liking.
Glitch has an intuitive editor UI (the site UI leaves a few things to be desired), it’s fast, and it has some cool features such as real-time collaboration and Rewind version control.
Glith runs node.js and packages a bunch handy development features such as,
- Instant deployment
- Secure hosting
- CDN for assets
- Secure storage of secrets and credentials
- GitHub import and export
You can also “raise your hand” and get help from the Glitch community. I tried raising my hand and left it up for about 24 hours without an answer. I was eventually able to figure out my own question, but as more people use Glitch, both the community involvement and library of apps to remix should improve.
@ShowdownBot
The code for @ShowdownBot is a version of Cheap Bots, Done Quick! that runs as a single bot, based on v21/tracerybot.
The steps to building a bot like this are,
- Remix @ShowdownBot or another like it.
- Build your own Tracery grammar set. Here’s a tutorial.
- Set up a new twitter app on your desired account
- Send a GET or POST request using Postman or API Tester to test your Glitch project. (Postman is more powerful. API Tester is simpler.)
- Use a free cron service like Uptime Robot to trigger the bot regularly
@ShowdownBot was remixed from a bot by Byron Hulcher. If you want to build your own bot like this, I recommend following Byron’s instructions to remix his bot on Glitch or check out more Twitter bot resources on botwiki.org.
https://twitter.com/hypirlink/status/843592850856165376
The concept for @Showdownbot is mainly a function of convenience.
Much of the corpus for this bot was cannibalized from @StinkpieceBot which I hand-wrote on a flight from Oakland to Minneapolis. (More handy corpra can be found here.)
@tinysubversions’s @BracketMemeBot also provided some inspiration.
There are some really creative, practical, and humorous bots and botmakers out there. I’d encourage you to check a few of them out — and try making your own twitter bot with Glitch.
Glitch is a powerful tool, has tons of potential, and I’ll be interested to see how the community aspect — and the software itself — continues to grow in the coming months.
@Showdownbot tweets every 3 hours. Here are some examples of the matchups it spits out:
https://twitter.com/ShowdownBot/status/993474358956969984
This post Making A Twitter Bot With Glitch: @ShowdownBot originally appeared on williamwickey.com.