| Image (cc) Cameron Daigle |
I had been playing with some of the old automation stuff the blog was set up with long ago; it seems the feed aggregators are mostly gone, as RSS has gone out of fashion, but the feeds are still going strong. They're what power a lot of the links in the sidebar as well as the blogroll, so I started seeing what I could do with them.
I found my very old Twitter account - and managed to remember enough to reset the password to gain access - to use for a bot, more on that below, and set up an experimental Facebook page. IFTTT leverages many APIs (it seems) to pass data to social media, amongst many other things, so I'm testing whether this post makes it to them now!
In the spirit of supporting the blogosphere I've also tried to get dlvr.it to pass random posts from the networks to Facebook and Twitter, with mixed success. It's easy enough to set up the inputs and outputs but some things I tried just didn't work.
Check out how well it's working here:
- Facebook: fb.me/plaspoly
- Twitter: @plaspoly
Hopefully I'll get the time to repurpose my Twitter Account to run a bot. Initially I want to build on the Doskvol Scores bot code I found to post results from the blog's various random generators, but Tracery looks such fun for recursive randomised string creation that I'd love to try some procedural character generators - and learn enough Python to be able to field and reply to requests:
"@plaspoly roll me a d&d character"
"You are a [Gnome] [Barbarian] who [hungers to avenge [the theft of [your people's ancestral lands] by [an elder god cult]]..."
Any advice? Thoughts? Comments always gratefully received.
