Today I wrapped up my Vaudeville Mews Twitter Bot that tweets “Today at the Vaudeville Mews…” messages using a data of Vaudeville Mews shows I archived earlier. This bot is dedicated to the recently-closed local Des Moines Venue of the same name.

I released the bot before completing it, and it immediately became more popular than any of my other bots. Originally, it tweeted out 12 shows a day at random. As of now, it tweets 2 early shows, 2 late shows, and one irregularly scheduled show per day. This should make it a little less noisy and also might make each tweet a little more special. I also had it calculate the length of each tweet just in case any show had too many bands to fit in 280 characters.

This bot works via a cron job that routinely hits a NodeJS API. Most of that API was already in place for the archival site, but I added a bit to make this bot work smoothly.

Looking forward, there are some improvements I could make:

  • Completing the data set (I’m missing data from December 2002 to November 2008)
  • Adding pictures, stories, and other archival content
  • Putting safeguards around duplicate tweets (there’s a slim chance it could randomly tweet the same show twice)
  • Filtering out some shows (cancelled shows, postponed shows, shows with certain bands now known to be predators)