Since I released @HoroscopeBot earlier this summer, I haven’t stopped thinking about Twitter bots as a creative medium. Corny “I could make a bot for that” ideas kept popping into my thoughts. After reading this appreciation of museum bots, I decided to try my hand at making something similar for a different catalogue.
This led to the creation of @EveryBookBot. Every hour, it takes a random word from Wordnik and tweets a book on that subject from the Google Books API. The goal is to mimic the serendipity of browsing a library or a friend’s bookshelves. Books cover such a delightfully broad range of topics, everything from crackle glass and Spanish fashion to concise philosophy and thumb wrestling. The more obscure subjects fascinate me; who loved this thing enough to write a book about it, and who was their audience?
Its sibling @EveryGameBot isn’t quite as diverse, but perhaps that’s to be expected from a younger medium. This bot tweets a random video game or board game every hour, drawing data from the Giant Bomb and Board Game Geek APIs. Highlights so far include a political game from 1894 and an obscure fighting game best remembered for its FF7 tie-in. Exploring old esoteric games feels particularly worthwhile in a culture that’s too often fixated on the new and popular.
On the technical side, both bots resize and tile the book/game covers using a JS ImageMagick library. The cover tiling is done to reach the 440×220 image size that Twitter prefers, though I rather like the aesthetic effect as well. I’m also using a simple PostgreSQL database (which Heroku conveniently provides) to ensure the same item doesn’t get tweeted twice. The source code for both bots is available on Github.
