So now that I have a subscription to Claude Code and have poked at it a bit, I felt it was time for a fully vibe-coded project. This is in advance of the librarians’ vibe workshop, which starts on Monday. I considered this for a few days and ultimately settled on building a Mastodon bot.… Continue reading Vibe, part 2
Category: bots
Teams bot
As many posts on this blog can attest, I am generally very pro-bot. Bots needn’t produce spam and influence campaigns; instead, they can provide useful or amusing content in many contexts. I have long wanted to make a Microsoft Teams bot in the spirit of Zoia, the Code4Lib IRC bot. In its day, Zoia was… Continue reading Teams bot
Thanksgiving challenge, bots edition
It is getting to be time for my annual post about the Thanksgiving Challenge. Previous editions of this post can be found here, here, and here. Basically, the challenge is to spend the entire Thanksgiving long weekend coding by yourself. I’ve already covered the questionable productivity benefits (and very real mental health downsides) of doing… Continue reading Thanksgiving challenge, bots edition
Literacies
Librarians have long been known to focus on literacy skills in their communities. But literacy is of course not monolithic. Besides reading skills, there are plenty of other literacies, such as financial literacy, computer literacy, research skills, interpersonal skills, career literacy, and so on, that librarians have worked on for decades. Robin Davis and I… Continue reading Literacies
The last days(?) of the Kingsborough Twitter archive
It looks like it might be the end of the road for our bot that archives tweets about Kingsborough Community College. Recently, the official @twitterdev account announced the impending end to the free tier of the Twitter API. On top of that, Mr. Musk himself suggested that the new replacement basic paid tier should cost… Continue reading The last days(?) of the Kingsborough Twitter archive
The unpredictability of bots
I recently made a Mastodon bot that didn’t really turn out how I expected. My goal was for it to be a bit cheeky, by being a bot who poses as a scholar. That’s not how it comes across. Rather, it presents itself as pedantic and over-confident. I suppose I could tweak it to make… Continue reading The unpredictability of bots
Making bots on Mastodon
I made a Mastodon bot this past weekend. It’s called Why, and it tries to answer the perennial question “Why?” with responses from public domain texts from Project Gutenberg. I built this for Mastodon, rather for Twitter, for a couple of reasons: I was curious about the Mastodon API and the tools that are available… Continue reading Making bots on Mastodon
Teaching librarians to build Twitter bots
Robin Davis (@robincamille) and I are running a Twitter bot-making workshop next week at ALA Annual in New Orleans. We’ve run this workshop a couple of times before, and it’s always been a positive experience. It’s a great way to introduce people to Python while building something fun. Right now, I’m in the midst of… Continue reading Teaching librarians to build Twitter bots
