Sam's Blog

Tweet a Quote (Twitter App)

Enter in the name of a famous person. Once you submit, my bot will find and tweet a random quote by them. You will be able to see the tweet once it's sent.

With each of the things I build, my objective is to learn something I don't know yet. In this case, I wanted to figure out how Django works and get better at deploying apps. I've already done some work with AWS but I wanted to really learn how to build the backend of a website from scratch and how to share it.

I already had an existing Twitterbot that would do a bunch of things like tweet a quote every few hours, DM new followers, follow people back, unfollow anyone who unfollowed me (that's right, my bot was built to be petty).

I decided to recycle this bot and build something that's actually interactive. Using Django I built an app that takes a name, searches for it on a specific website and webscrapes a random quote by that person. I kept the quote webscraping component from my previous bot (see here for the code) and simply modified it to take a value from an HTML input form. Then I just had to build a website with a user form, find a way to pass whatever value was inputted into said form, pass it through my Python functions and return the results on another webpage. Then I had to modify all my scripts so I could actually deploy it for use by the general public. I used Heroku for deployment since I already have some familiarity with it and since it integrates super well with Django and Github. Lastly, I used my limited HTML knowledge to make it look pretty.

Once all that was done I still had to figure out how to embed the webpage into my blog in such a way that it was seamlessly integrated (and so that it works).

Overall, figuring out how to build the backend of a website was tough but I'm really pleased I was able to make something that works.

I always find that when I set out to learn something, I end up learning a million other things I had never thought about. For example, I had never thought about dealing with CSRF, xframes, switching between GitHub branches, or even the complications of taking values from user inputs. What I took away from this whole project is that experience really is the best teacher (and that it's cool to have friends you can go to for advice - shout out to Monica and Alex).

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