Three bits of bot-related news.
## @asciibot revived!
A while ago I made a bot, inspired by @wwwtxt, which tweets random sentences from files in the archive at textfiles.com. It's a lovely archive of stuff, a snapshot from the oldskool BBS days, when ASCII was all we had and the files were trading currency in themselves. A combination of API changes by Twitter and defunct hosting platforms killed it off before, so I'm glad to have got around to reviving it.
botkit released!
In resuscitating asciibot, I've written a bunch of bot code which is nicely reusable and takes care of boring stuff like getting an OAuth token from Twitter and scheduling tweets. I've released this toolkit as botkit; hopefully it'll prove useful for others and grow as more things are built with it. I've already got a roadmap for the next couple of versions.
burning, raving
Finally, the creation of botkit allowed me to make a bot that I've been meaning to make for ages: @burningraving. It tweets one line an hour from Dylan Thomas's poem Do not go gentle into that good night, and there's so much to say about it that I've given it another post all of its own.