CutePetsNYC @CutePetsNYC

This is a bot that retrieves listings from New York City animal shelters and tweets photos and profile links to eligible pets.

Forked from [CutePetsBmore][https://github.com/Ryan-J-Smith/CutePetsBmore]. Inspired by previous work by CutePetsDenver and CutePetsAustin.

The python script assumes that available animals are posted on the Petango service.

Quickstart:

On twitter:

1. Create the twitter account that will be used to post tweets
2. Log into this new account and navigate to http://apps.twitter.com
3. Create a new app with permission to post
4. Generate credentials (consumer keys and access tokens)

In code:

1. Configure credentials.py by adding the keys generated by twitter
2. Install dependencies pip install -r requirements.txt
3. Modify shelters.py to include desired shelters from Petango (see below)
4. Tweet a singe pet listing: python tweet_pet.py

Schedule regular tweeting with crontab (Linux):

1. From the command line, edit the crontab file: crontab -e
2. Schedule the script to run every hour using a line similar to: 0 * * * * /usr/bin/python /path/to/tweet_pet.py >> /path/to/log.log) 2>&1

Notes:

Extension to other shelters

The shelters.py scrapes the Petango page listing to get the list of shelters dependent on the ZIPCODE and DISTANCE_IN_MILES variables, both of which must be integers typecasted as strings. Shelters may be manually determined and set as SHELTER_IDS if the bool SCRAPE_IDS is set to False.

The tweet_pet.py retrieves a list of animals from each each of the shelters found by shelters.py then tweets an animal at random from this list. As a result, modifying this script to access animals from other shelters is as simple as modifying this dictionary.

Avoidance of duplicate tweets

The script tweet_pet.py attempts to avoid reposting tweets about the same animals. This is done by tracking recent tweets in a buffer file created by the script. The size of the buffer file can be adjusted by changing the value of the NUM_RECENT_TWEETS in tweet_pet.py.

Addtional notes:

• I intended this to run on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian. The python script posts a new tweet each time it is called. Regularly scheduled posting is handled by cron.