11 Months of Learning Python & Testing Automated Social Media Pages

This article is an updated version of Python for Automation I posted on mighil.com

I’m more of a front-end development person.

Though I routinely manage and optimize the servers for optimal performance, Python or Node weren't part of the production stack.

The Every Tom and Jerry Frame in Order Facebook page sparked my interest in the area of "social media automation for entertainment". I grabbed that project's source code and started tweaking it.

Failed miserably at first. Then I wrote an email to the code maintainer. They were generous and wrote back. The emails went back and forth until I fixed my script.

Learning and tweaking Python code has been a spiritually refreshing experience. I had a good time writing various other scripts. I set up 18 automated social media pages in 30 days.

These pages were powered by tmux sessions hosted on my DigitalOcean server.

The progress

I religiously use modules like OpenCV, moviepy, Wikipedia, Pillow, FFmpeg, schedule, requests, JSON, etc., combined with certain API services to get sh*t done.

I’ve managed to learn more about JSON data as well.

I’ve also started using WordPress REST API with Python3.

And now, I can build automated pages and chatbots on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Discord, Telegram, Instagram, or any social media websites that provide API access and documentation.

Uninteresting data attached as images.

Dead Bots. Bless You, Zuck.

Most of the links are dead now (unpublished) because of the account termination.

Deep Dreaming Harvard Art Museums Bot — A Facebook page that lets you explore Harvard Art Museums in DeepDream (neural network) mode. Objects are picked in no order. No logs stored on my server.

Met. Museum Bot — Another art museum based on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s API. 474383 objects in total.

Fishbot 13229 — An ultimate wiki-bot that shares photos and information about fishes. I use fishbase.se’ data as the base to gather Wikipedia info and images.

Birdbot 11147 — Another wiki-bot destined to share photos and information about birds. It also shares the IUCN Red List status.

Insect Bot 35499 — A bot that appreciates hexapod invertebrates.

CryptidWiki Bot — A bot based on cryptidz.fandom.com’ data. It shares stories about various cryptids in a timely manner.

Amphibians & Reptiles Bot — Another wiki-bot that shares photos and information about amphibians and reptiles.

Plant Bot — A bot that randomly posts an image of your favorite photosynthetic eukaryotes. The image search isn’t perfect yet.

Bots With Attitude — A bot based on GPT-2 captions and AI-generated (API) photos. Still a work-in-progress.

abstraktr.py — A script that generates CC0 1.0 abstract art every hour. Based on an open-source project.

Haunted Places Bot – US Edition — A bot that shares info about haunted places in the US. The script uses data from Shadowlands Haunted Places Index. Images are randomly captured from search engine results.

@1000000Bot — A script that randomly shares a website URL (from Alexa’s dataset) and its basic PageSpeed insights.