Tag: Twitter
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Deploying a tiny Mastodon server on DigitalOcean
Given the current bin-fire state of Twitter it seems entirely reasonable that everyone I know there is building a survivalist-style-bunker on Mastodon. But there’s a pretty immediate roadblock that faces every person trying to set up a new account: which server to choose? While Twitter is monolithic – one site, one account, one @name –…
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How to archive, then delete, old Tweets
I joined Twitter in January 2009 for what might not have been the best of reasons – I was being miserable about it on BBC Radio, and thought I should at least make an effort to try the thing I was being professionally miserable about – and, somehow, have kept using it ever since. But,…
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What the Robot Reporter learned from 10,000 news tweets
In January 2015 I put together a simple twitterbot called Robot Reporter. The idea was to see if I could keep track of breaking news by monitoring Twitter for the journalists who use it as a way to find images of newsworthy events. It works a little like this. Something happens, and a user photographs it: Fire…
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How To: Write a RTing Twitter bot in PHP
File this one under “stuff I’ve been meaning to look up for ages”: yesterday I finally sat down and wrote a Twitter-bot. You know the kind – a dedicated account that looks for updates containing a certain word or phrase, then retweets them – I often end up being tweeted by @redscarebot, for example. Anyhow,…
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When bad news makes money, making up bad news is good business
The other day a message scrolled past in my Twitter feed: Which made me think: if the sea off Fukushima really were boiling, I’m pretty sure we would have heard about it. Except if there were some sort of amazing cover-up, in which case why would NHK (which is, essentially, the Japanese BBC) be showing…