Once upon a time I was a character in a (wholesome!) meme a friend posted to a publicly-visible Earlham Facebook group. The meme, which I’ve stored for posterity here, said that one quality about me is “Takes pictures of cool trees”.

So my Twitter bot is super on-brand.

You can now follow @cooltreepix for pictures of cool trees! They were all taken by me and tweeted once per day. I’ve removed or never added geolocations, but probably 90% are from eastern Montana or the Richmond, Indiana, area.

Details follow for the curious. 🙂

What this bot does

Every day this bot tweets a tree picture.

That’s… that’s it, it tweets a picture containing one or more trees. Sometimes the tree will be the subject of the picture. Other times it will be a picture where the tree somehow accentuates the main element, e.g. fall color. The images are of varying quality but most were taken by my iPhone (currently an iPhone 7).

I kept it simple. I didn’t (and still don’t) want to collect your data or do much in the way of analytics. I just wanted to make a simple non-spammy bot that tweets a nice picture once a day.

Process

Here are the steps I followed, roughly, so that you can try your own:

1. Create a Twitter developer account. I was doing this for education and with no intent to collect data etc., so I had no problems at all in creating the account.
2. Create your app. If you’re not going to use it for your own account – i.e. if you want to allow the app to tweet on an account other than the @username of your developer account – make sure to enable “Sign in with Twitter”, though there are some more complex ways to do this if you have a specific reason to try them.
3. Get a cloud-based server to set up your dev environment and hold any assets you need. At first I used AWS because (1) I needed something guaranteed to always be running and (2) I’ve been wanting to learn AWS. Ultimately I decided to stay on Earlham’s servers, but I’m glad to now have the AWS account and some experience with it. Your environment should have some flavor of twurl to make authentication via terminal easier (for more on that, see the next section).
4. Write your code. I used Python and the tweepy library. My code is simple. As I describe in more detail below, the setup process was much harder than the coding. If I add any features there will be changes to make, but for now I’m happy with it.
5. Try it out!
6. Iterate until it works, fixing or adding one thing at a time.
7. Maintenance.

When you’re done, most of the time your bot should live on its own, just a bot doing bot things.

Biggest challenges

Coding, it turns out, wasn’t the hardest part. I probably only spent about 10 percent of my time on this project programming. The greatest challenges:

1. Authentication: This was easily my biggest time burner and the problem that most of the steps above solve. It’s easy to make a bot to tweet to your personal developer account but there are extra steps to tweet to a different account, as I wanted to. Worth noting: after you’ve authorized the app on whatever account you want, check out your twurl environment (e.g. if you’re running Linux, ~/.twurlc) to get the customer and access tokens that are needed to make the bot work.
2. Image transfer: It turns out that when you have a lot of images they take up a lot of storage, so moving them around (i.e. downloading and uploading them) takes gobs of time and bandwidth. I knew this from a project in college, but if I needed a reminder I certainly got it this time.
3. AWS: I now have a free-tier AWS account, which took some wrangling to figure out. I decided not to use it for this project in the end, but the learning experience was good. I want to try configuring it better for my needs next time I do a similar project.
4. Image sizes: Twitter caps your images at a particular size, which was producing errors at the terminal and a failure to post tweets. I eventually used ImageMagick’s convert (via a Python subprocess) to solve the problem.

Notes on ownership

All photos tweeted directly by the bot are mine (Craig Earley’s) unless otherwise noted. Please don’t sell them or use them commercially, as they are intended for everyone’s benefit. Also please give me a photo credit and share this link to my site if you use them for your own project.

If you want to submit a tree photo, tweet it to me @cooltreepix or @craigjearley. If it’s a real picture of a tree, I’ll retweet as soon as I see it.

My logo is from the Doodle Library (shared under a CC 4.0 license) and edited by me to add color. My version is under the same license.

Finally you can put a little something in my tip jar if you want to support work like this.