In my previous post, I talked about how after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, I was giving more attention to Mastodon. Since then, I killed my twitter account, launched my own Mastodon instance, launched three new Mastodon bots (including a new one that goes live this morning), and converted Joe Travels to only post to Mastodon.
The new bot is called Good Morning, Milwaukee! and I created it to test the limits of my ability to create a Mastodon bot. It gets sunset info, sunrise info, the weather, the news, and a live photo. For the news article, it randomly picks between the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal (limited to just local stories) and the Milwaukee Business Journal. Once it picks a publication, it picks a random story amoungst the five most recent ones. For the live photo, it picks a random one from three (i43 at Silver Spring Drive, Cathedral Square Park, or the Milwaukee River at the MIAD campus). The whole bot is written in Node, using Pipedream.
The other two bots are MCTS and The Hop. They both post the details of a random stop (including a Google Street View image) once per day.
I don’t consider any of this to be a finished product. Everything is going to need some tweaking, moving forward. I’m going to try to stop building new bots, though.
Please drop a comment if you have any questions and feel free to check out Toot Works if you are interested in checking out what Mastodon is all about.
[ Cover photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash ]