I’ve been playing about with twitter bots, and following some instructions on using the twitter API in python, I’ve created a bot that tweets a link to a random charity every half an hour.
The code and more details on the bot can be found on github. From the readme:
Twitter bot that tweets the name and website of a random charity. The data is based on the register held by the Charity Commission for England and Wales, released as open data.
The bot randomly selects an active charity from the register, and tweets it. If the website of the charity is known it tweets that too, otherwise it gives a link to the official register entry for that charity.
This bot isn’t affiliated with the Charity Commission, and gives no endorsement of the charities tweeted.
Credit due to the following places:
- Fetch charity data script adapted from https://github.com/OpenDataServices/grantnav/blob/master/dataload/fetch_charity_data.py
- Twitter API use from https://videlais.com/2015/03/02/how-to-create-a-basic-twitterbot-in-python/
- Charity data from http://data.charitycommission.gov.uk/ – used under Open Government Licence v3.0
