bmghack / bmgpetbot

BMGHack's Twitterbot to post Tweets about pets at the local shelter. Inspired by 'cutepets'.

Help shelter pets find a home.

This is based on/inspired by the Code For America cutepets project: https://github.com/codeforamerica/CutePets

It is different in that it is in Python, pulls data from the city of Bloomington, Indiana's 'adoptable animals' site, and includes some code to assist with deploying as an AWS Lambda Function.

To run it:

• Use Python 3
• Install the modules in the requirements.txt file (virtualenvs are good here): pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt
• You also need a 'config.py' file containing all your API secrets & keys
• Deploy as per the README.md in the 'lambda_deploy' subdirectory

bmgpetbot's Issues

Add hashtags

Tweets are more likely to show up with hashtags. For example, #dog #beagle #shelteranimal #pets.

Issues w/ no photo pets

On the site, when pets have no photo, there's a generic .svg file that causes tweepy to choke.

Questions about AWS account and temp file for image

I'm creating my own twitterbot for Louisville Metro Animal Services in R. Have a few questions if you have the time.

1. Whose account did you use for the AWS Lambda Function? ...Animals services or City of Bloomington or BMGHack or someone's personal account?

2. If you got a free tier account, do you know what happens when that expires. I know (at least I think I know) the function stays active and you get the same invocation and GB/s rates but do you still have access to change or update the code if something happens?

3. "1/20/2018 SDC don't save image to temp file!" from petbot.py. Assuming you didn't create a temp file, how did you tweet the image!? Twitter doesn't allow image links to display images so if I can't create a temp file, I'm stumped.

4. Out of curiosity, what does SDC stand for? lol

Thanks for your time and also the code!

Tweet formatting

Any chance of updating this twitter bot to something like this instead of the stacked variables in the attached image?

Adopt Snowball, a very large American female rabbit, age 6 years 1 month! #rabbit [etc]
Adopt [Name], a [size] [Breed] [sex] [species], age [age]! #[species] [etc]

Remove additional intro text when it appears.

From the animal shelter folks:

First suggestion is to add a new line between the animal description and the animal name... for example "Very Sweet!!! NO Chip BW is:" is confusing to parse
if the descriptions are too long, they're also fine with leaving those out of the tweet

Proposed - need to change the way BeautifulSoup is parsing it to use the structure of the doc more.

Add geotagging

Geo tag the tweets, so they will show up in 'near me' searches.