Simon WillisonFeb 3, 2023

Ported my @covidsewage bot over to Mastodon

Every morning it posts an image with the latest Covid sewage charts for various locations around the San Francisco Bay Area - because the sewage charts are the only figures I still trust!

The sewage doesn't lie

The screenshots come from https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater - here's the latest image:

Show threadSimon WillisonFeb 3, 2023

The bot runs entirely from this GitHub scheduled actions workflow: https://github.com/simonw/covidsewage-bot/blob/main/.github/workflows/toot.yml

It uses my https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ CLI screenshot automation tool and the excellent https://toot.readthedocs.io/ Mastodon CLI utility

covidsewage-bot/toot.yml at main · simonw/covidsewage-bot

The @covidsewage bot. Contribute to simonw/covidsewage-bot development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
Show threadSimon WillisonFeb 3, 2023
Amusingly, I found toot because I sat down to build myself a CLI tool for posting to Mastodon (an equivalent of my existing https://github.com/simonw/tweet-images tool) and checked PyPI to see if the name "toot" was available... and it had already been taken by a tool that did EXACTLY what I wanted to do
GitHub - simonw/tweet-images: Send tweets with images from the command line

Send tweets with images from the command line. Contribute to simonw/tweet-images development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
Show threadSimon WillisonFeb 3, 2023
Here's a TIL describing how the new Mastodon bot works - should be handy for anyone else who wants to create their own bots too: https://til.simonwillison.net/mastodon/mastodon-bots-github-actions
Building Mastodon bots with GitHub Actions and toot

Twitter [announced today](https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1621026986784337922) that they'll be ending free API access for bots. My [@covidsewage](https://twitter.com/covidsewage) Twitter bot po

Show threadEric CaseFeb 3, 2023
@simon for some reason, Ivory just sits here spinning? Any other Ivory app users here able to Follow this new bot account?
Show threadSimon Willison
@case how odd! I just unfollowed and followed in Ivory and it worked OK
Feb 3, 2023 at 4:31amWeb
Show threadEric CaseFeb 3, 2023
@simon got it working. I’d pasted the https link and was relying on Ivory to parse the “user” URL, which has worked in the past. Maybe there’s a subtle bug in there somewhere.