Check out the bot on twitter: @mafalda_bot 🤖 and in portuges: @mafalda_bot 🤖 (pt)
This repo has the code and the data for a bot that tweets a Mafalda comic from Quino every couple of hours.
The bot runs (every two hours) through the cron of the github actions. It turns out that github actions is a simple way to run the code without worrying about the infrastructure (with a very high uptime for the effort, except when the github or twitter APIs are down)
The data is kept obfuscated in the crypt dir (for fear of DMCA and other evils in the world). If for some reason you need to access the magic, it's here.
The bot is very simple:
- Choose one comic at random.
- Tweets the file.
An attempt was made to publicize the bot with various methods (from telling friends to paying for advertising) but the result was terrible, less than 20 followers. To solve this, there is the auto_fav.py that looks for tweets about Mafalda in the last week and faves them in the hope that the user will see the bot and be of interest.
This script can run in a cron with flock (to prevent it from running again if it is already running) like this:
30 * * * * /usr/bin/flock -n /tmp/amps.lockfile python3 /path/to/auto_fav.py