-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
/
Copy pathREADME.Rmd
77 lines (50 loc) · 4.37 KB
/
README.Rmd
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
---
output: github_document
---
<!-- README.md is generated from README.Rmd. Please edit that file -->
```{r, include = FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
collapse = TRUE,
comment = "#>",
fig.path = "man/figures/README-",
out.width = "100%"
)
```
# rstatspkgbot
<!-- badges: start -->
[<img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/dynamic/json?url=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TimTeaFan/rstatspkgbot/run_bot/data/followers&label=Twitter&query=$.data.followers&style=social&logo=Twitter">](https://twitter.com/timteafan/status/1511034067344572422?s=21)
<a rel="me" href="https://botsin.space/@rstatspkgbot"><img src="https://img.shields.io/mastodon/follow/109705735000267415?domain=https%3A%2F%2Fbotsin.space&label=Mastodon%20&style=social" alt="Followers on Mastodon"/></a>
<!-- badges: end -->
## Hi I'm rstatspkgbot ...
<a id="logo" href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TimTeaFan/rstatspkgbot/main/man/figures/logo_big.png"><img src="man/figures/logo.png" alt="rstatspkgbot's logo a robot with an R hex sticker" align="right"></a>
... an automated Twitter and Mastodon bot made by [Tim Tiefenbach](https://twitter.com/TimTeaFan). I tweet mostly about #RStats packages on CRAN. On Mastodon I only toot one tidyverse, shiny or ggplot package a day - given that the volume of Toots is much smaller there than on Twitter. On Twitter I additionally tweet about three random R packages from CRAN a day.
If you want to see my tweets in your feed, follow me on Twitter or Mastodon.
If you are interested in my setup, have a look at the remainder of this README and browse my code.
The most essential parts are:
- the [R script](/R/create_post_and_tweet.R) that creates and posts the Tweets and Toots
- the [YAML script](/.github/workflows/tweet_rpkg.yaml) that automates my workflow using Github Actions
## Idea & History
For some time I wanted to get acquainted with the Twitter API and the {rtweet} package. I came up with
several projects and this Twitter bot was one of them. The idea was to create a simple but still helpful Twitter bot without spending too much effort on it. Since there are over 18,000 packages on CRAN, I thought it might be helpful to see some Tweets in my timeline introducing random packages I might never have heard of otherwise. Maybe similar Twitter bots exist already, but the whole project was about making one myself.
## Setup
The setup is rather simple, mainly because {rvest} and {rtweet} make it really easy to scrap websites
and interact with the Twitter API. The basic workflow is:
1. read-in the actual list of packages on CRAN
2. match it (anti-join) with a list of packages already tweeted about
3. draw a random package out of the remaining ones
4. create and post a Tweet and Toot linking the CRAN package website
5. add the newly tweeted package to the list of already tweeted packages
This workflow is automated via GitHub Actions. The whole project is set up as an R package that
contains a description file with all dependencies.
## Acknowledgements
When creating this Twitter bot I closely read and followed [this blog post](https://oscarbaruffa.com/twitterbot/)
by [Oscar Baruffa](https://twitter.com/oscarbaruffa/) and [this blog post](https://www.rostrum.blog/2020/09/21/londonmapbot/) by [Matt Dray](https://twitter.com/mattdray/). When porting the Twitter version of this bot to Mastodon I followed [this post](https://www.rostrum.blog/2023/02/09/londonmapbotstodon/) by Matt Dray.
Thank you both for your write-up, this made things much easier compared to figuring stuff out myself.
Credit goes to the creators and maintainers of the amazing {rvest}, {rtweet} and {rtoot} packages! Together they make it ridiculously easy to scrap website contents and interact with the Twitter API.
Finally, credit goes to GitHub for providing a service like GitHub Actions for free. I still can't
believe that this doesn't cost a single cent.
## Disclaimer
This is just a side project which I built in my free time. It comes with no guarantees whatsover.
If you find a bug, just file an issue (as with any other repo).