I was in need of creating a retweet bot that would find all instances of #sqlsatphx in twitter and retweet the specific post by changing the hash tag from #sqlsatphx to #sqlsat47. Not knowing exactly how to accomplish this I turned to google. There I found a video that was helpful, but the overall special effects of the video made it difficult to follow. I won't get into the details, but you can see for yourself. I am not knocking them in anyway, but I would have suggested less of the special effects. Here is their link. http://twitter.hyveup.tv/2009/07/how-to-create-auto-retweet-twitter-bot.html. I am basically following their steps with a few modifications that I felt were necessary to accomplish my desired end results.
Well to give you an example of what I was looking to do, here is a post that i was targeting:
And this was my expected end results:
Well in order to accomplish this you will need the following things:
- A twitter account
- A twitter atom search string
- A yahoo account to create a pipe
- A twitterfeed account
Create your twitter account
If you don't have one, signup is a breeze. Visit
http://twitter.com and create an account. Then visit
http://search.twitter.com enter the criteria you wish to search for in the search field and press the search button. I searched for #sqlsatphx.
This is my targeted conversation I want to RT and post with my account.
Get twitter atom search string
Once you are at the results page, near the top right hand side of the page right click and copy the link titled:
Feed for this query. Your clipboard should contain something similar to the following: "
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23sqlsatphx". Copying the URL in the address field will not work, because it is missing the
atom in the URL string. You'll need this URL when we start creating the Yahoo Pipe.
Creating a pipe via Yahoo Pipes
Visit
http://pipes.yahoo.com and either sign-in or signup for a Yahoo account. Once you're logged in click the very visible
Create a Pipe button at the top of the page, inline with the navigation menu. Now you should be at the design page. I created a relatively simple pipe which fit my needs just fine. You of course can experiment and get as detailed as you need. Once your finished you'll save and name your pipe. Then once you run the newly created pipe you will need to grab the RSS link.
So here is a video of the steps I took to create the pipe.
Create a TwitterFeed.com account
Visit
twitterfeed.com sign-in or signup for an account. Once that is all said and done you will need to name the feed and paste the RSS URL that you copied earlier and into the RSS Feed URL field.
Then be sure to associate the twitterfeed to your twitter account and
DO NOT authenticate using the OAuth option. Type in the username and password.
Once you setup your setting like in the screenshot above, click the Continue to step 2 button and on Step 2 is where you will setup the twitter service.
Once that is all setup it will take approximately 30 mins before it gets posted on twitter.
End results...
