In my previous blog post I mentioned building my first Twitter bot. Now I built a (Twitter) bot wiki.
There’s a plenty of tutorials for creating online bots out there, but the information is pretty scattered.
There are sites like bothub.org, botpad.org/p/bot_resources (currently unavailable), bot.community or even botdb.gameology.org/bot-list – and plenty of assorted Twitter lists collecting the various Twitter bots, but what I’d really love to see is a more complete website/wiki where one could find tutorials, articles, APIs, datasets and other useful resources – and also browse other people’s creations.
Botwiki is exactly that – and it’s open-sourced!
The key difference between Botwiki and other sites I came across is that it’s meant to be extremely simple to run and update – hence using the PHP-based Pico CMS to power the site and Markdown to edit the content of the site. You don’t need to make an account on the site to contribute to it, you can either open a pull request on Github or just send me a simple text file with basic description of your (Twitter) bot.
Another part of the Botwiki project is the @botwikidotorg Twitter account. This is actually a bot that listens to @ mentions and if your account is whitelisted, it will retweet your tweet. The main use is for the Botwiki maintainers to be able to tweet about updates to the wiki without having to switch to the @botwikidotorg account. There is an open issue on Github to discuss other uses.
After I cleanup the code, I am going to also open-source the code for this bot, so keep an eye on @fourtonfish or github.com/fourtonfish 🙂
