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New Twitter bot: Tom Swift book covers.

Just went live yesterday with a new Twitter bot: @TomSwiftBookBot, which posts randomly generated Tom Swift book titles and covers.

The title is generated from a random sample of words insired by actual Tom Swift titles. The title is passed over to Flickr's API, to search for freely usable images (i.e., no copyright restrictions or those explicitly in the public domain). Once an image is found, it is cropped and annotated with the title using ImageMagick, a long-lived image manipulation library.

Then the title and image are sent over to the Twitter API, where they are posted hourly. My current title-space is something like 60,000 random titles, which should last me several years at an hourly posting rate.

The code is running on a tiny server out in the Amazon AWS cloud, using a free developer plan that gives me something like a year of free server time, so for now it's costing me nothing. And it's only a small script running there, so any other bots can also use the same server, if need be.

This article is my 67th oldest. It is 176 words long