Episode: 1532
Title: HPR1532: Project Idea - White-Hat Spam Bot
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1532/hpr1532.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 04:45:03

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Hello Hacker Public Radio, this is Nightwise and on the other side of the world and on
the other side of my handset because I'm actually recording this in the car over Skype
while having a massive cup of coffee is my good friend and co-host of the AGP podcast
and also a regular guest and aficionado on Nightwise.com, Katie Murray. Hey, Keith, how
you doing? Good morning, Mr. Nightwise. I'm doing pretty well. I hear we're here to talk
about one of our little side projects. Yes, and this sounds like a commercial for
steak knives. Hey, Bill, what do you have there? Well, now you ask it. I have steak knives.
We plan to do this show to talk about something that we are working on and that we need
the community's helpful. Basically, we want to write the ultimate social media promotion
tool that helps podcasters and websites, owners and everybody who works with social media
help to get their point across to a plethora of social media networks 24, 7 without being
a pesky spammer. Yes, so basically what we're saying is we're trying
to build a white hat spam bot. That's a good one. A white hat social media spam bot. I'll
put it into context a little bit. You guys know that I am a podcaster. I've been so for
a couple of years as Keith. We are both bloggers and there's only one downside to being a blogger
and a podcaster is that you have to promote your shows. So you have to keep your social,
you know, your listeners entertained and how do you do that? Well, you post your shows
to social media. Well, that's nice, but we have day jobs and lives. So there is more, you know,
to do every day than just see that we can promote our posts to social media. The other downside is
that I sleep when many of my listeners are awake. I will live in Belgium. We have a terrible time
zone lag of between six or nine hours, which makes for crazy recording schedules like 8 a.m. in
the morning while having massive coffee. And what's your time over there, Keith? We're just coming
up on 11 o'clock at night. So I'm really ready for bed and nightwise is having coffee. And yeah,
so that's part of the part of the challenge is this global distribution of social media followers.
I know I have followers from pretty well every time zone, except for the ones that are only over water,
if there are any. Yep. And then then there's a question of how do you reach these? How do you
communicate your points across to all of these people? There is one tagline I always use and that
is let technology work for you. And what I started noticing when I wanted to really engage with
my audience is that I was working for technology. I was doing nothing more than trying to, trying to
Twitter at the craziest of times and reposting stuff to because there's some Facebook listeners
out there. There are people on Google+. And it's just a drag. We also, I think all of us have
interesting links that we want to share when we're on our ever RSS readers. So what do we do? We
share, share, share, share, share. And then you basically blow out this blob of links in a very
short period of time. And everybody who's outside that time field doesn't see it because it gets lost
in the stream. And everybody who is online at that time gets spammed. There you go. So what we are
looking for is a whitehead spam bot script that posts social media content that you have pre-curated
to the social media's because I want to be able to do different channels
at a time slot where you wanted to. So it has to be, you know, be able to be scripted and timed.
And that's what we want to do. So over the last couple of months, actually it's probably been
three or four months now since we've really started thinking about this project. There's been
bits and pieces of the solution that have crept forward. And really it boils down to wanting to
be able to time things at specific intervals and being able to separate content out into specific
streams. Some of them are going to be, you know, like I say blog posts and podcasts. Some of them
are going to be, as my wife said, sort of links curated from your feeds. And being able to
distribute them out at such a time that it seems, I don't want to say it seems natural. We're
not trying to fool the world into thinking that we're online when we're not. But what we want to do
is sort of sprinkle these posts out throughout the day rather than pounding down a huge big
lead of them all at once. And also being able to put this content to Twitter and to Facebook and
to LinkedIn and to really any other Google+. Of course, I forgot about all the almighty Google+.
And anywhere else, I mean, identical or anywhere else that people have a following and you want to
be able to promote some content or promote what you're working on. And what we basically also want
to do is use that content to get a conversation started and then pick up on that conversation
when it's starting to go and when you're awake, this is not an automated drone. This is
a butler who takes care of this for you so you can pick up the conversations with your community
as they start to happen. So what we started at this point to get into a little bit of the
technical details and I don't want to make this all about the tech that we've chosen to this point
because quite frankly, it's negotiable. The ultimate goal here is to end up with a solution
that is automatable, that is cross-platform, that is scheduleable and will interact with all
of the necessary social media that we need to get interacting with. And we'll receive its inputs
from other services like, for example, using the power of the internet like, for example,
if this then that or something like that. Right. Yeah, we don't want a necessarily restrict input
to one specific thing. Like right now, we basically have two input streams and that is flat files
being generated by if this then that and RSS feeds from blogs and or podcasts.
Now, the preliminary work on this script has been done. We are standing on the mighty shoulders
of Lord Drachenblut, who together with me a couple of years, I think it's over two years ago,
helped me make the proto version of what we're working on right now. What we did was we took
start items from Google reader, had if this then that post those into a flat file and have the
script take the top line of that file and post it to Twitter and Facebook at a certain time.
And because this was the head of the file, we tongue in cheek, no pun intended with tongue in
cheek because we called it give head. When Google reader went away, we had a serious problem because
the ability that we wanted to to perform didn't really exist anymore, hence the need to take this
up a notch because we tried to rework it in the new era without Google reader. But we are now
at a point that what we need is something more than just the basic proto give head script that
Lord Drachenblut came up with. So now we move into the next part. Where we are right now, we have
about 150 lines of Python that will do the basics of pulling items out of an RSS feed and
punting them to Twitter. That part of the script is pretty well finished. What we would really like
is if there are members of the HPR community who are interested in coding or who are interested
in this project or have thoughts, suggestions or best of all time to get in touch with either
night wise or myself. And let's go place them open source games and see if we can't build ourselves
a white hat spam bot. Now this white hat spam bot will be open source. So this will come back
to the community and will be an open source script. To just to give you guys a big picture of
what we're going to do, I'm basically going to list up my requirements. Because in this
cooperation between Keith and I, Keith has been the brains in the code and I have just been
the pesky whiny podcaster who is basically awake when everybody else is asleep.
What I want to do is I want to have two things done. I want to have my RSS feed of my website
being scanned by the script. So it takes out the description of the show and the link to the show
and a small piece of text. Then I want to be able to star a couple of items in either RSS readers
or God knows what or select a couple of items and have those titles and links exported or
brought to a flat text file and I used if this then that for that. So it's very easy and if this
then that to set up a rule that creates a title of a post and a link to a post either or not
with some text-adended like I found this link link to the post title of the post and post that
into a flat file for example on Dropbox. And this is where our script is going to begin. It's going
to begin with an RSS feed that is online and has to be read and parsed and with a flat file that
is constantly updated by a different script and that contains links and articles. So this can also be
promotional tweets that you have written up in advance and that you want the script to pick and post.
Posting needs to be done to Twitter, to Facebook and to Google Plus. You can post a Twitter
using the API or an app, to Facebook using an email address and to Google Plus you can also use
an email address to post a Google Plus and if you want to know how to do that there is a good
description by door to door geek on how he does that. So basically using the API from Twitter
and the ability to email to two addresses, one for Google Plus, one for Facebook, we can spread out
those messages to the three major social media channels. So that pretty well sums up what we're
trying to accomplish with this project. It's something that it seems real super simple on the
surface. We're finding it's a little deeper than we originally planned and one of the things
that we have to avoid as we move through the project is continually trying to throw features in
before the basics of the script are done. The first version of my rebuild that I did with
Nightwise a few months ago had tons of features and didn't work. So that's why we sort of simplified
things around. This time around I have gone see some pretty bare bones, some Python implementation
and are moving forward with that now. So if again if you're interested, if there's if there's
any interest in that, please hit up Nightwise Nightwise.com or on Twitter is Nightwise.
I'm you can hit me up kdmarygmail.com or you can hit me up on Twitter as well kdmary
and we're looking forward to finding some collaborators in the HPR community. Anything else you want
to say before we wrap this up? No, I hope that many of you have both listeners and coders are going
like, yeah, it would be cool to have something like that because I'm amazed that there is nothing
out there that basically does what we want it to do. So I hope you see the benefits that you see
the challenges and the opportunities to work on this because it's a very interesting project
and this is a call out to the most powerful collective hive of coding brains out there. So I hope
that we get get your response. Alright, thanks Nightwise. You know, let's probably let you get
your workday started and I'm going to try and find my pillow. Oh yeah, I'm going to get to work.
I just finished coffee. See? Now if I tweet something, kd's going to be asleep. I will
kd tweet something. I'll probably get it the next day when not when he's asleep. It's not logical.
So we need to fix that and anybody who comes up with a fantastic name for the script gets bonus points.
Alright, thanks Nightwise. See you guys. Bye. Bye, Keith.
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