I just created my first Twitter Bot, Stories from Another Universe.

This bot tweets out titles of media “from another universe”. To create these titles I took popular media (books, movies, games, etc) and substituted nouns & adjectives randomly. For instance, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom might become Indiana Jones and the Toilet of Doom. I was inspired to do this because my Order in the Court app has a similar function that generates random case names in the format The Case of the ADJECTIVE NOUN. I enjoyed seeing the randomly generated phrases (some funnier than others), and wanted that feature to live on its own. That exact structure is used by this bot with Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the ADJECTIVE NOUN. This uses some of the same code as Order in the Court does.

This app allowed me to experiment with the Twitter API and cron-jobs, both of which I am unfamiliar with. I used the Twitter Developer API a bit with Order in the Court, but this would be a more intentional use. I have never used CRON jobs outside of Travis CI. I set a cron-job on cron-job.org for this bot to trigger every four hours.

I’m excited to see what titles this comes up with. Meanwhile, I’m thinking of other bots to build in the future.