Using ruby to make a tiny twitter bot is so simple. So in 25 lines I used the twitter and hpricot gems to make a bot that pulls a random quote from the puerile b3ta.com/talk.
# Rakefile
namespace :b3ta do
desc 'find a random quote from b3ta.com/talk and post it to twitter'
task :random_quote do
hdoc = Hpricot(open('http://www.b3ta.com/talk').read)
subs = []
hdoc.search(".post1, .post2") do |post|
username, subject = '', ''
post.search(".username") do |un|
username = un.inner_html
end
post.search("b") do |b|
subject = b.inner_html.to_s.gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, "")
end
subs << "\"\" " if subject != ''
end
message = subs[rand(subs.size - 1)]
twitter = Twitter::Base.new('twitter_username','twitter_password')
twitter.post(message)
puts message
end
end
To set it up and running, just put in a real twitter account and use “rake b3ta:random_quote”. Simple. Ok it may lack any error checking what so ever, but its still amazing what you can do with Ruby with such little code. (check out the rather offensive twitter feed here)
