Sheep

The rainbow mind machine sheep. credit

Structure of the Sheep:

• Constructor:

  • Create lumberjack logger
  • Initialize Twitter API instance
  • Initialize parameters from JSON file (sheep-specific/account-specific parameters)
  • Initialize parameters passed into constructor (overwrites JSON file parameters)
  • These parameters are available as self.params

• Twitter API initialization method:

  • Initializes Twitter API
  • Uses self.params to set consumer token
  • Uses parameters from JSON file to get oauth token

• Perform action method(s):

  • Uses dispatcher method
  • If we call perform_action('tweet'), this will look for a method called tweet() and run it.

• Action methods (general template):

  • User will pass in extra parameters (action-specific parameters)
  • Parameter validation
  • Set API endpoint
  • Use oauth token to create oath Client object
  • use client to make POST request

• Tweet method:

  • Tweet method has an inner loop and an outer loop
  • In the inner loop the bot populates a queue and tweets each tweet in the queue
  • In the outer loop (infinite loop) the bot continually repeats the inner loop
  • Inner sleep/outer sleep set the time interval between tweets and between runs of the inner loop