Twitterbots! It was really cool to get programming in Python “out in the wild” and actually see things happening as a result. There’s some childlike glee in seeing lines of code transformed into action, and that seems to be amplified when the output is coming from twitter rather than a simple printout. In addition to getting the bot to walk through lines of text, I also was able to get it to post photos randomly selected from some I’d downloaded to my computer, which took a little more finagling. What I would really love to do is get it set up so that it’s watching the twitter stream and responds whenever somebody tweets at it or uses a certain hashtag, but that turned out to be a whole new can of worms when I tried to get started during our workshop, especially since my hasty google search didn’t find any useful implementations of tweepy along those lines.

Overall, I think that’s the one thing that really stuck out to me: the frustrations in sifting through tweepy’s documentation trying to figure out how to do things. I’m thankful to have a library to take care of calls to the twitter API for me, but nothing sucks quite so much as knowing there’s a function defined in a class and not being able to figure out how to call it. Another option would be to just write a program that searches for the things I’m trying to respond to whenever I run it, but that’s not nearly as fun as having it actively monitor the stream live. I’ll probably play around with both implementations a bit and see if I can get either one working; all of the ideas I could come up with for bots were pretty lame, but I definitely like the idea of having it be responsive rather than just chunking out lines from a text file. Here’s hoping that instinctive excitement at writing a program and watching it tweet helps me power through the torrent of error messages that are sure to be coming my way…