As usual, lazy-man post overview:
With this post you can learn to make a Twitter bot that will automatically retweet users talking about keywords that you specify. You can achieve this with (just about) no coding whatsoever.
Why would you want to do this? Lots of reasons I guess, ranging from spammy to fairly genuine. Normally giving somebody a ReTweet is enough to make them follow you and it keeps your profile active, so you can semi-automate accounts and use it as an aide for making connections. That or you can spam the sh*t out of Twitter, whatever takes your fancy really.
Here we go.
Step 1: Make your Twitter Bot account
Head over to Twitter.com and create a new account for your bot. Shouldn’t really need much help at this stage.. Try to pick a nice name and cute avatar. Or something.
Step 2: Find conversations you want to Retweet
Okay, we’ve got our Twitter account and we’re going to need to scan twitter for conversations to possibly retweet. To do this, we’re going to use Twitter Search. In this example, we’re going to search for “SEO Tips”, but to stop our bot Retweeting itself you want to add a negative keyword of your botname. So search for SEO Tips -botname, likely this:
So my bot is called “DigeratiTestBot”. Hit search now, muffin.
Step 3: Getting the feed
The next thing you need to do is get the feed results, which isn’t quite as simple as you’d think you see. Twitter being a bit of a prude doesn’t like bots and services like Feedburner or Pipes interacting with it, so you’re going to need to repurpose the feed or it’s game over for you.
After you’ve done your search you need to get the feed location (top right) so copy the URL of the “Feed for this query”
Store that in a safe place, we’ll need it in a second.
Step 4: Making the feed accessible
Okay, so there’s a teeny-tiny bit of code, but this is all, I promise! You’re going to need to republish the feed so it can be accessed later on, but don’t worry – it’s a piece of cake. All we’re going to do is screen scrape the whole feed results page onto our own server.
Make a file called “myfeed.php” and put this in it:
<? $url = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=seo+tips+-yourbotname"; $ch = curl_init($url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); $curl_scraped_page = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); echo $curl_scraped_page; ?>
The only bit you need to change is:
“$url = “http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=seo+tips+-yourbotname”;”
which needs to be replaced with whatever your Twitter RSS feed that we carefully saved and stored in a safe place earlier. If you’ve already lost that URL, please proceed back to Step 3 and consider yourself a fail.
So, having completed this and uploaded your myfeed.php to your domain, you can now access the real-time Twitter results feed by accessing http://www.yourdomain.com/myfeed.php.
Step 5: Yahoo Pipes!
Now comes the fun bit, we’re going to set up most of the mechanism for our bot in Yahoo Pipes. You’ll need a Yahoo account, so if you don’t have one, get one and login and click “Create a Pipe” at the top of the screen.
This will give you a blank canvas, so let’s MacGyver us up a god damn Twitter Bot!
Add “Fetch Feed” block from “Sources”
Then in the “URL” field, enter the URL of the feed we repurposed, http://www.yourdomain.com/myfeed.php.
Add “Filter” block from “Operators”
Leave the settings as “Block” and “all” then add the following rules:
item.title CONTAINS RT.*RT
item.title CONTAINS @
item.twitter:lang DOES NOT CONTAIN EN
(You click the little green + to add more rules). Once you’ve done that drag a line between the bottom of the “Feed Fetch” box and the top of the “Filter” box to connect them. Hey presto.
Add “Loop” block from “Operators”
Add a “String Builder” from “String” and drag in ONTO the “Loop” block you just added
In the String Builder block you just put inside the Loop block, add these 3 items:
item.author.uri
item.y:published.year
item.content.content
Check the radio box of “assign results to” and change this to item.title
Great, now drag a connection between your Filter and Loop blocks. Should look like this now:
Add “Regex” block from “Operators”
Add these two rules:
item.title REPLACE http://twitter.com/ WITH RT @
item.title REPLACE 2009 WITH (space character)
Extra points for anyone who writes “(space character)” instead of using a space. Also don’t miss the trailing slash from twitter.com/
Drag a connection between Loop Block and Regex Block, then a connection between Regex and Pipe Output blocks.
Finished! Should look something like this:
All you need to do now is Save your pipe (name it whatever you like) and Run Pipe (at the top of the screen).
Once you run your pipe, you’ll get an output screen something like this:
What you need to do here is save the URL of your pipe’s RSS feed and keep it in a safe place. If you didn’t lose your RSS feed from Step 3, then I’d suggest keeping it in the same place as that.
Step 6: TwitterFeed
Almost there, comrades. All we need to do now is whack our feed into our TwitterBot account, which is made really easy with TwitterFeed.com. Get yourself over there and sign up for an account.
To set up your bot in TwitterFeed:
1) I suggest not using oauth, as it will make it easer to use multiple Twitter accounts. Click the “Having Oauth Problems?” link and enter the username and password for your TwitterBot account and hit test account details.
2) Name your feed whatever you like and then enter the URL of your Yahoo Pipes RSS that we carefully saved earlier, then hit “test feed”.
3) Important: Click “Advanced Settings” we need to change some stuff here:
Post Frequency: Every 30mins
Updates at a time: 5
Post Content: Title Only
Post Link: No (uncheck)
Then hit “Create Feed”
All done!
Have fun and please, don’t buy anything from those losers who are peddling $20 “automate this” Twitter scripts. If you really need to do it, just make it yourself or if you don’t know how leave a comment here and I’ll show you how.
Bosh.
