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Programming An Auto Tweeting Bot Using Tweepy and Beautiful Soup 4
I want to start this blog off by saying this was not the type of bot I actually indented to create when I first started this project, but since it was just for fun I decided to roll with it and ended up creating something completely different than I had originally planned on. Because of this, this will probably be the first edition of my Twitter bots. Besides that let’s get started covering all of what I did to get this thing working.
First things first, I started by scraping goodreads.com. Specifically the quotes section of their website, I did this to obtain a list on famous quotes essentially that I could then use to tweet along with a picture. This was a quite an easy step thanks to Beautiful Soup 4, I essentially just checked through this link https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/{tag} and would then be able to search through any of goodread’s pages of quotes just by passing in any variable that also exists on their site. I next set up a function that would run my scraper and collect all the data into a json file. I will provide an example of my collect_quotes.py file below in a cell.
After having a json file filled with example quotes, the next step to work on was getting pictures to use. For this I used Unsplash’s API, again thanks to these super awesome tools this turned out to be a super simple step as well. All that really needed to be done was acquire the access key from Unsplash and input it into a few spots. Other than that I used two simple functions; the first to get a random link image to some image, then a second short function that would take in that random link as a variable and then download it as a png file into the working directory that could then be used to tweet. I will again provide an example of one of the functions below.
