a big list of bot-making resources

I’ve been talking about how easy it is to get started making bots for a while now, but I haven’t done a long-form writeup of all of the tools that I use that you might find useful. So here we go: a list of resources that I use for making Twitter bots.

Tracery Basics

• Cheap Bots Done Quick This is the software that most of my Twitter bots run on. It handles the regularly scheduled posting as well as the replies
• Tracery The language my bots are written in
• Tracery Visual Editor
• Another Tracery Editor
• Tracery Interactive Tutorial

Non-Tracery Tools

• Auto-fave/Retweet bots I use these for the honeybots
• Zach Whalen’s SSBot

Word Lists

• SCOWL Wordlist creator
• Ashley Bovan’s Word Lists Includes words by syllable count, hyphenated words, words by parts of speech, and other lists
• The Great Noun List
• Corpora Lists of interesting words

List inspiration

• The Noun Project I never use any of the Noun Project stuff directly, but they have a lot of lists of icons of various objects put in useful categories, which can be good for when you need to think about, say, common appliances, but it’s hard to name them all off the top of your head
• Spellzone word lists These are for learning English, but can also be useful for when you need a bunch of words for certain things, like buildings, appliances, household objects, etc; I usually just keep a notepad tab open and write down a handful that will work for what I’m doing
• Wordnik I often will pick a fun sounding word, look at what lists people put it on, and then look at those lists for more word inspiration

Text/List Editing Tools

• Whitespace remover
• Comma Delimiter Turns lists of words into code; use commas as separator and double quotes for Tracery
• Find and replace In case the one in wordpad/notepad isn’t quite enough
• Case Converter
• Dolch Sight Words This is actually a word list for teaching kids to read fluently, but it can work well for basic bot vocabulary

Images/Graphics

• Public Domain Photos
• Vintage Printables This one’s particularly good for technical illustrations
• Wikimedia Commons
• Glitch’s game assets, PNG conversions

Miscellaneous Guides

• Instant disposable Gmail addresses for signing up for Twitter
• Hook, bait and camouflage: making a honeybot

Further Reading

• Ethical bot-making An overview of bot-ethics with lots of good links
• So you want to build a generator…