Tag Archives: twitter

LinkArchiver, a new bot to back up tweeted links

posted on 11 July, 2017 also tagged , , , ,

Twitter users who want to ensure that the Wayback Machine has stored a copy of the pages they link to can now sign up with @LinkArchiver to make it happen automatically. @LinkArchiver is the first project I’ve worked on in my 12-week stay at Recurse Center, where I’m learning to be a better programmer. The […]

New Twitter bot after artist Gerhard Richter

posted on 26 January, 2017 also tagged , , ,

This week I went to the SFMOMA for the first time. It’s great! I spent hours there and felt like I had to rush to see even a fraction of the collection. One of the pieces that really struck me was Gerhard Richter’s massive 1974 painting “256 Colors” (or “256 Farben” in his original German). […]

New bot: @i_remember_txt, tweeting Joe Brainard’s “I Remember” (1975)

posted on 23 January, 2017 also tagged , , , , ,

Joe Brainard’s 1975 book “I Remember” is an incredible work of poetry. The New Yorker called it “his miniaturist memoir-poem,” and Paul Auster’s blurb for the 2001 edition gives a good sense of it: I Remember is a masterpiece. One by one, the so-called important books of our time will be forgotten, but Joe Brainard’s […]

Making ethical bots, over at Motherboard

posted on 27 March, 2016 also tagged , , ,

To my tremendous honor, Sarah’s Motherboard article about instilling ethics in Twitter bots quotes me in a few places. In particular, it recounts a story I hadn’t told publicly about a bot I didn’t make. Recently, Higgins hoped to make an iterator bot out of turn-of-the-century popular music that had been digitized by the New […]

New bot: @choochoobot

posted on 13 March, 2016 also tagged , , , ,

It’s a goofy idea: After a few happy-hour drinks on Thursday, I decided to write a little Python script to make emoji “trains” of random length, combining the steam engine with the two styles of rail cars. Once I got that running, I remembered reading about Emma Winston’s “Tiny Gallery” bot, which tweets little scenes […]