Tag: twitter

This is #DS106

One of the best things about DS106 is the riffing and playing with other participants. I dipped my toe in the daily create stream yesterday and pulled out a great example:

As I saw this late there were already a great bunch of responses, I giffed:

tdc1713

I had intended to have the notes ping right off the sheet, but this looked ok and it was late (so late I lost a few frames that would have made the jump a little more dynamic).

Todd said:

and Ron:

Today Viv iced the cake:

There are deeper thinks going on on DS106 but this is #4life

Along the Daily Trail

I’ve not been keeping up with #western106 much other than a couple of artonthecouch posts.

But I have done the odd Daily Create. I am noting them here as some sort of record before they are lost in twitter.

The 4th February:

Create an Oregon Trail Game Screen for DS106

ds106-nyan

A quick google for the Oregon Trail found a pile of bitmap art. Seemed like a nyan cat riff might be appropriate. Downloaded the gif, opened in fireworks and chopped away.

5th February:  Create some stop motion using Vine

I’ve not got a vine account so just make a 6 second stop motion video. Snapped some photos with my iPhone (sitting on a lego mount), stitched together with the 5secondApp and exported as a video. I had to speed it up a bit to get 6 seconds, here is a 17 second version.

 

7th February  Add to the Code of the Cowpoke

A one line response:

8th February  5 Years Since Dr Oblivion Disappeared: Craft an Western…

coyboyoblivion

The idea of Cowboy G-Men is a a wee bit mind boggling. This is a really badly edited file. Quick & dirty. I did run a quick fliter over the cover to try and match the Doctor’s face, but didn’t spend enough time on it to do a good job.

11th February  Treasure of the Hills

We were to draw a map. Remembering the ‘lights out for the territories’ above I remembered that the map is not the territory. So my tweet went:  this mondrian is not the territory

mondrian-map

Which lead to a nice bit of twitter banter.

and so on…

12th February  Extra Terrestrial Visitors from the Far Frontier?

nyan-cow

Was a no brainer, back to FireWorks for a quick edit. The cow head was found on Flickr with a no known copyright restrictions filter.

Yesterday:  Caption Remington

an-unbranded-cow

I was trying to hint to other folk that they should license their DS106 content to make it review and remix friendly.

The stream for the daily create has been pretty active and it is great to see all of the different responses. I am not sure I’ll get to doing much more on #western106 but I am certainly enjoying the odd 15 minutes on the daily create. Thanks to Alan (and Mariana) for the continual work on organising the fun.

 

A #DS106 DailyCreate Twitter Bot

dailycreate-botThe DailyCreate Bot

I’ve always liked random and automated random things. While these are not strictly part of storytelling I’ve managed to bring them into DS106 whenever I can.

A while back I set up @DailyCreateBot for some reason or other. Obviously a Twitter bot of some kind to do with the Daily Create. I do remember having trouble with the OAuth requirements of the more recent Twitter API and giving up.

Last weekend, on a rainy day I blew the dust of my raspberry pi and got it online and set up as a server. I was not too sure what to do with it at the time.

During the week I did revisit a project to use the pi to flash some lights depending on a Twitter search. I don’t have hardware for that but I was interested in how simple the project was. There seems to be plenty of libraries that can sort out Authentication to Twitter for you now. A bit of googling and thinking, mostly googling and I have a Twitter bot set up.

The @DailyCreateBot will reply with a suggestion of a photo challenge of you mention him on Twitter. I am using the same list that Alan Levin provided for me for the photoblitz.

The @DailyCreateBot runs on Python. This is where the pi comes in I would not even know where to begin to find out how to host a python app but the pi lets me do that easily.

I am not proposing to write a step-by-step guide here but it is worth mentioning that several things went wrong or did not work as expected. All were beyond my 2 weeks worth of Python on the mechanical mooc . All were solved by a wee bit of googling and sometime just repeating things till they worked. The delight of working on a pi is that I knew I’d I totally messed up I could just reformat the SD card, install an so again and be back to square two.

I had already:

  • installed one of the basic OS FOR THE PI
  • Set up SSH access so that I can get ‘on’ to the pi from the terminal application on a mac and via SSH apps on iOS.
  • set up the pi as a web server and sorted out the DNS

Next:

*I found a python library and example code that replied.
*I added logic to reply with a random string taken from a list of challenges.
*Tested it a bit.

Then I posted to the DS106 Google + group and a few kind folk tested it a bit. Rochelle asked:

That is cool +John Johnston . It worked for me right out of the bot box. Do we upload to Twitter, tag them DailyCreateBot? I’d like to see what others have done. 🙂

Which got me thinking. A quick google found a php/JavaScript solution to showing tweets with the hashtag #dailycreatebot and I’ve got this up and running.

All very much a work in progress. There are few things to be ironed out:

  • the Python bot falls over every now and again complaining about UTF8 I need to google that some more.
  • the web page showing images just uses the styles used in the demo of the code. I need to tidy it up and perhaps skip tweets with the hashtag but no images.
  • there is also the problem Rochelle pointed out that if you reply to the bot you get another prompt. I wonder if I could turn off replies if there is an image in the tweet?

Anyway if your expectations are low you can join in:

  1. Tweet @DailyCreateBot and get a prompt.
  2. Tweet your photo with the hashtag #DailyCreateBot
  3. See what other folk are doing.
  4. Let me know of any interesting problems.