Marlene

The new sensation in BeaverBots.

Requirements

• NodeJS
• NPM
• MongoDB
• Git
• An electronic computer
• The ability to sign up to Twitter
• An active internet connection
• Leslie Nielson's severed left index finger that's been preserved in a jar of piccalilli (optional)

Usage

####Install Node, NPM and Mongo:

• http://www.joyent.com/blog/installing-node-and-npm/
• http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/installation/

####Set up Twitter:

• Sign up for an account at http://www.twitter.com.
• Go to http://dev.twitter.com and create an application, it's unimportant what you call it.
• Allow both read and write access for the application.
• Make sure you generate both access tokens and customer tokens; there should be four tokens in total.
• Modify data/secrets.json with the token generated by Twitter.

####Pull down the repo: git clone git@github.com:MaffooBristol/Marlene "/path/to/Marlene"

####Install dependencies from NPM: cd /path/to/Marlene/ npm install

####Send a single Tweet: node marlene

Alternatively, you can run the executable directly. You may have to run chmod 770 marlene to use this method.

./marlene

###Command line parameters:

• --dry-run or -d: View the tweet you would have sent, without actually sending it. A bit like seeing the boat you could have won at the end of Bullseye.
• --secrets=file.json or -s=file.json: Select the JSON file in which your secrets and keys etc are kept.
• --phrases=file.yaml or -p=file.yaml: Select the YAML file in which the triggers/responses are defined.
• --method: One of intrude, for single phrase search mode; reply, for looking for replies to respond to; or observe for leaving a socket open to manually wait for replies and respond to them.

Compiling from sauce

If you're a saucy devil and want to get involved in the production of Marlene, fuck off! It's mine!

I jest, of course.

####Install Jitter globally: sudo npm install -g jitter

####Install Coffeescript globally: sudo npm install -g coffee-script

####In a separate terminal, start Jitter to automatically compile Coffee into JS: jitter src/ lib/

Current version: 0.0.1 (Wogan's Run)

####Todo

• Mongo will stop the same tweet being replied to, but the same trigger/response should be stopped from occurring within succession- maybe ten tweets or so.
• Needs to be able to respond to "wtf" and "who are u?" replies, etc.
• Run with Cron or run as daemon rather than firing once and exiting.
• More advanced error handling.
• Move it into Express and create a front-end.
• Central Mongo database/database merging.
• More intelligent phrase munging.
• More phrases, phrase groups, etc. Ability to define a "bot" with its own settings.
• Different states- replying, tweeting randomly, butting in on conversations.
• Knowledge of the user to whom old Marlene is replying. Male? Female?
• Grunt, Travis, Rollbarm, testing etc.
• Create phrases that can be fired by multiple triggers. Many to many rather than one to many.
• Get a fucking life.