It’s alive…

PLEASE NOTE – The Gary Glitter Twitter Bot was developed as a joke. I am NOT a nonse, I do NOT run paedofile rings.

Now, onto the post…

I was bored over the festive season, so I decided to do some php coding and make something useful. But then I made the Gary Glitter Twitter Bot instead. This all got started because I had a bout of insomnia last week, and tweeted “I am bored”. Half an hour later I noticed that I had been retweeted by some “Bored Bot”. This then got me thinking about what kind of Bot I would make if I had the chance?

I toyed with a few ideas first (No-Pants Bot, Skinhead Bot, Rasputin Bot, Clockwork Orange Bot etc.) – before it stuck me – Gary Glitter!

How it works is this:

Saved a twitter search for “Gary Glitter” and pulled the results into a php generated page on my server:

http://www.tomfogarty.com/glitterfeed.php

This URL is then used with Yahoo Pipes to create an RSS feed here:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=fd58a8756ab1250c1891fbfb0e82df74&_render=rss

I then used twitterfeed to post it through to the @garyglitterbot twitter account.

Then every half an hour it auto-searches for “Gary Glitter” tweets and copied them (5 at a time). It’s not working 100% properly yet as it doesn’t actually retweet the results – it just copies them and tweets (basically stealing) – although it does provide a link back the original source.

Still,  it’s my contribution to the world and I’m very proud.

LATEST UPDATES – all bugs mentioned above are now fixed. The Gary Glitter Twitter Bot now retweets properly. “COME ON, COME ON…”

Tags: Gary Glitter, Gary Glitter Twitter Bot, Tom Fogarty, Twitter Agent, Twitter Bot

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 30th, 2010 at 13:22 and is filed under Announcements, Computers, How To, Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.