I’m a fan of Twitter bots. Not the Russian propaganda ones, but rather the musings of unstaffed Twitter accounts that randomly generate surrealist content. I enjoy the abstract renderings of Soft Landscapes, which offers automated and surreal yet soothing landscape art. Yayfrens Bot always injects some cheeriness into my timeline, awful excuses adds to my social engagement avoidance toolbox, Year Progress reminds me that the year is going too darn fast, and House Hunters Plot is just hilarious if you’re a fan of HGTV.
Naturally I wanted to know how it was done. It turned out to be pretty easy! I get annoyed whenever I see educators touting learning styles as if they’re a real thing, so I decide to make a Twitter bot that generates absurd learning styles, because, you know, why stop at visual, kinesthetic, or verbal?
Hosted by the wonderful Cheap Bots, Done Quick, here’s the result of my own foray into surrealism, which auto-generates a new learning style every six hours:
Creating a Twitter bot is way easier than I thought it would be!
You just have to have a little patience to figure out Tracery grammar, which is simple code that allows you to build out a bot’s logic. You can see examples of Tracery grammar and host your own bot via Cheap Bots, Done Quick. See this guide to making your first Twitter bot. You can get word lists from dariusk’s corpora on GitHub.
Check out learninstyle’s code:
cheapbotsdonequick.com/source/learninstyle
What kind of bot would YOU make?