Our Southern cousins in Sydney and Melbourne have daily threads which encourages a bit of chatter… Where’s ours?

I’d love to be the change I wish to see in the world, but I have no idea how to automate this any better than an alarm on my phone saying “post a daily thread idiot” and I’m sure there’s a better way.

  • deadcatMEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Ok, I’ve just written a script to call the Lemmy API and (hopefully) post the thread at 12:05am.

    I pulled the data I needed regarding properties and URLs from some test REST calls, then implemented a post bot using the official Lemmy HTTP client.

    and now we wait…

    • Rusty Raven English
      2·
      1 year ago

      Please Please Please tell me what you are doing, I am still having trouble with mine. The tests all worked fine but it won’t post past midnight, and so obviously won’t work on a recurring basis. Also the part that does the pinning is just crashing the whole thing at the moment and I had to take that section out.

      • deadcatMEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Oh… I better add pinning.

        I’m using a typescript app. I trigger it with a cronjob that runs a bash script wrapper.

        I should be able to put my code up on github this afternoon. :)

        • Rusty Raven English
          1·
          1 year ago

          Are you able to tell me what app and how you actually run it? Having code is great, but no one seems able/willing to tell me what to actually do with the code. I have been running it in Visual Script on my laptop which works for a while but not for long. I’ve also been trying to use Vercel to run from their server, but I can only get it to run there in build mode (which is time limited) and not transfer it to an ongoing cron job.

          • deadcatMEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            I’ve cleaned up my code and checked it in here: https://github.com/dfrencham/lemmy-post-bot

            I use Visual Studio code (I run it using the Linux subsystem for windows).

            I’ve put instructions in the README.md file, and cron setup instructions in the SETUP_CRON.md file.

            If you are not setup to build the bot, then I can create a built version and post a .tar.gz file for you to use.

            • Rusty Raven English
              2·
              1 year ago

              Thank you, that is a lot simpler than the code I was using. Although I have miraculously got mine to work now, so will probably stick with that rather trying to redo it at this point, at least for now. It’s been a steep learning curve, but I am starting to somewhat understand what I am looking at with the code now, so that’s something!

              • calhoon2005English
                2·
                1 year ago

                I enjoyed this and it was very wholesome. Well done you two.

              • deadcatMEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                Great to hear it is working :) always a great feeling.

                I’ve updated my code to output a single .js file which can be called with node. The file is in a zip here: github

                If you have a look at the code updates, you might find feature/unfeature code useful. :)