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Radical Software

LCST 2234, Fall 2021 (CRN 9430)
Rory Solomon

Project 1, Twitter setup: Creating your own Twitter bot

Twitter Developer Accounts

So far you have been using a Twitter developer account that I signed up for, which I created as a group account (an "organization" account in Twitter parlance) for us all to share. This week I would like you to sign up for your own developer account and to start using that.

The process is simple in some ways, and complicated in others. Back when I created this shared account, I created some video documentation of the process, which I hope will be helpful in guiding you through the process yourself.

> Twitter developer account signup (9min 43sec)

I wouldn't call this is precisely a "tutorial" per se, as I'm not walking you through the precise steps that you will need to follow. But I hope that watching it will offer you guidance as you go through the process.

After completing the steps shown in the video, I had to wait for my account application to be reviewed and then answer some questions in an email. This process was either frustrating or humorous, depending on your outlook of the world. But I wanted to share those emails with you as well as I think they too may be instructive:

I hope that by looking through this you might gain some insight into the process, and what you will need to say and do in order to get your account approved. Perhaps the process will be more straightforward for you than I made things for myself.

Credentials

After getting your account approved, you need to vist the Twitter Developer Portal:

> https://developer.twitter.com/en/portal/dashboard

And follow these steps:

  1. Click "Projects & Apps"
  2. Click "Overview"
  3. Scroll down a little and click "Create App"
  4. This will show you your "API Key" and "API Secret Key". You need to copy these and paste them in to your authorization_tokens.py file, replacing the values that I originally provided you.
  5. Next, up at the top of the page, under the name of your new app, click on the tab that says "Keys and Tokens", and where it says "Access Token & Secret", click "Generate". This will show you two additional long strings that you need to copy in to your authorization_tokens.py file as the access_token and access_token_secret.

After all of that, you should be able to run your project code again and see tweets posting to your own account.

Class spreadsheet

Once you have your developer account setup, please add a row to this spreadsheet so that we can all find you. Include your name, the twitter username for your developer account, and then copy/paste the URL to your account (I know this is redundant but it will be convenient for us to be able to click through). Lastly, add some notes if there are any special instructions for how we should interact with your bot — for example, does it reply to mentions, and is there something we should "say" to it to trigger good responses?

If you would like to see some student projects from last year, you can find some of them here:

Good luck!