Web archiving for bots

January 31, 2018 3:19 PM

Web archiving for bots
From the explanatory post: I’ve made several bots over the years. They’re mostly Twitter bots. Some of them are throwaway larks, and some of them only work in the moment. If Twitter becomes too harmful to humanity to gift with free content, I’m OK with letting those go. However, there are many bots whose fate I want to keep in my own hands, rather than Twitter’s. To that end, I built a static site updater.

The code that powers the archiving here. Now, most of my bots are available outside of Twitter on sites that are updated regularly (usually a few times per day):

Link Finds
Our Magick Future
Hail Ants Bot
Snake People Bot
Member Facts
Space Weirdness Bot
Bot in the Street
Improvebot
Demake Bot
Pokémon in the NYPL
Fucking Shakespeare
Business Words
Contingency Messages
Cleromancer
Autocomplete Jokes
Monster Subtypes
Autocomplete Rap
2020 Candidate Bot
GODTRIBUTES

It's a thing I've meant to do for a long time!

Role: developer

posted by ignignokt (4 comments total)

So this lets you...hold onto your bots?
posted by Huffy Puffy at 1:05 PM on February 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

How did you build the bots in the first place? I see the content (have a soft spot for Fucking Shakespeare in particular), but not the process.
posted by artlung at 9:39 AM on March 1, 2018

Unfortunately, I don't have any writeups on the process, but if you are into source code, you can search for any of them on this page to see that. The core of Fucking Shakespeare is in this module.
posted by ignignokt at 5:47 PM on March 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

I was guessing there was a Markov chain aspect but this is better quality and more crafted. Nifty! Thank you for sharing!
posted by artlung at 6:21 PM on March 2, 2018