Experiment Twiiter Spot Feed

Old Reflector
1

I’ve been playing about with RSS and Twitter today. Not for any real purpose at present but just to see what is involved in making it work. The result of an afternoon playing about is now running. The bot happily takes the RSS feed from SOTAwatch, parses it, plays about with the format and then tweets the individual spots.

There’s nothing special about this, there already is another spot feed and there’s also the QRPSPOTS feed as well. To be different I’ve added hashtags to each spot. So a 20m CW spot gets the hashtag #SOTA_20m_cw and an 80m SSB tag gets #SOTA_80m_ssb and a 2m FM spots gets, of course, #SOTA_2m_fm.

An example tweet is:

21:48 GMT
N5XL on W7A/MN-050 - 7.032 cw
last band, last call…getting too windy up here. cq now… [N5XL]
#SOTA_40m_cw

The main purpose was to play with the technology. So far it’s a bit like when they invented the laser. A case of great, but what are we going to do with it? You could use the hashtags to look for cw spots only. Or data only.

I’ll probably end up hooking the SMS spotter up to this so you can request the last 5 spots or last 5 40m cw spots to be tweeted and then pick up the tweet by SMS yourself.

Does anyone else have any thoughts about what could be done?

If you want to see what it is doing either search on the hashtags #SOTA__ or you can see it directly where its Twitter ID is @P559M350

Andy
MM0FMF

2

In reply to MM0FMF:

Is anyone using this feed? I ask because I forgot to restart it when the server was rebooted a few days ago and nobody has reported a lack of tweets! :slight_smile:

If nobody is using it and as it replicates other other Twitter feeds then I’ll turn it off. Or more accurately, I wont restart it.

It’s provided me with a fantastic learning resource. Most importantly how to handle RSS and how to keep a process running when its resources are coming and going. In fact after the early instability was fixed the only downtime has been due to Twitter changing its API and the odd restart of the host machine. The RSS code is directly used in my SOTA cluster.

Unless someone really, really wants this and no other feed will do, then it will be goodbye after 39948 tweets.

Andy
MM0FMF