Today in History on Twitter

22 October 2010

With my copious amounts of free seconds, I've written another Twitter bot. happened_today is operating differently from my other bots, which all reply to keywords posted by other users. Instead it tweets an event from history every hour or so, as my own personal "Today in History" Twitter bot.

The data is scraped from Wikipedia, and I wrote a Really Simple History API to allow general access. The API outputs JSON, which I then slurp into the bot, and spit out random events over the day. It's pretty crude, but it works.