How-to Hi, Weatherbot!
A Node-based Twitter bot, one easy step at a time—plus the way John Keefe teaches basic botmaking to class of journalism/design students.
Tool Mockingjay: A Smarter Repeater
Meet our Twitter bot that follows a list of users and retweets them when they mention a certain topic.
How-to Twitter Mapping: Foundations
Twitter’s data editor lays out the major challenges and opportunities that arise when you set out to map tweets.
Project How (and Why) We Made Twitter Reverb
- By Simon Rogers
- Emma Alterman, Scott Benish, James Buckhouse, Dino Citraro, Brett Johnson, Kim Rees, Simon Rogers, Earl Swigert
- Periscopic, Twitter
Twitter’s Simon Rogers introduces Reverb and walks through his team’s design and development work with Periscopic.
Project How We Made @NailbiterBot
The first full round of March Madness is Christmas morning for college basketball fans: 2 days, 32 games, lots of upsets and late-game drama. Last week, on the first full day of the tournament, WNYC transportation reporter Jim O’Grady casually mentioned that he couldn’t keep tabs on all the action during the day. He wished he could get a text message whenever a game was coming down to the wire so he would know when to neglect his professional responsibilities and tune in for the end. I started kicking around the idea in my head a little, and after work my colleague Jenny Ye and I decided to take a break from writing weird JavaScript to write some more weird JavaScript. The result was @NailbiterBot, a humble Twitter bot that posts a tweet whenever an NCAA tournament game is close late in the second half.
Project To Scrape, Perchance to Tweet
At the Chicago Tribune, we had a simple goal: to automatically tweet contributions to Illinois politicians of $1,000 or more, which campaigns are required to report within five business days. To see, in something approximating real time, which campaigns are bringing in the big bucks and who those big-buck-bearers are. The Illinois State Board of Elections (ISBE) has helpfully published exactly this data for years online, in a format that appears to have changed very little since at least the mid-2000s. There’s no API for this data, but the stability of the format is encouraging. A scraper is hardly an ideal tool for anything intended to last for a while and produce public-facing data, but if we can count on the format of the page not to change much over at least the next several months, it’s probably worth it.
Project Creating an API of Veterans Affairs’ data
- By Cole Goins, Erika Owens, Shane Shifflett
- Cole Goins, Shane Shifflett
- The Center for Investigative Reporting
The Center for Investigative Reporting recently released an API of data from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which it compiled in reporting on a backlog of disability claims.
Project Meet Tarbell
Introducing a very simple content management system from the Tribapps team (and friends).
Roundup Event Roundup, Apr 22
- By Erika Owens
Journalists gather in Italy this week, while Hacks/Hackers chapters hold meetups on balloon mapping and HTML 5, plus a cryptoparty.
Project Fast Hacks: GameDay Live
The Daily Emerald’s Ivar Vong breaks down a homepage takeover experiment.
