raspberry pi python projects

01/11/2019

My Raspberry Pi Python Twitter bot stopped posting last night. After I had strong words with it, and told it to pick up its game I deleted the cache database file and let it rebuild the history.

This is something that I really need to fix, as my PiHole shows that my bot has made approx 191,383 calls to the twitter api in the last 24 hours… touch wood I’m not banned yet :p

Woke this morning to cat1 issue: the internet isn’t working, oh noes, no Netflix or Youtube! Checking the router I found that the DNS server (aka PiHole) wasn’t behaving. A reboot of the Pi solved this, but I could see that the Python Twitter bot had been skiving again, and hadn’t posted a feed for 3 hours; retweets looked good, so account not blocked, phew 🙂

I’ve a script to check the quality of the RSS feeds that I use, and this was failing when run, only showing a fraction of the list, bugger!

So this morning has been an exercise of finding the feeds that are still live and readable, and remove the ones that are corrupt.

There must be an elegant Python script to achieve this, but I required a fix ASAP, so I dropped back to familiar tools and popped open Libre Office Calc. As a corporate analyst across many industries and departments Excel has been my main tool for many years, I don’t use Microsoft Office at home, so it was a wonderful pain free experience to find everything that I wanted to do was easily achievable.

Nothing too complex, all that I missed was the familiar keyboard shortcuts 🙂

  • couple of lists to update
  • vlookup (couldn’t get match to work as expected?) to refer to my qualifying and defuncnt URL’s
  • pivot table to ensure my results were unique

The initial list of 205 RSS URL’s has now been trimmed down to 172 clean working feeds, and these can be tested sequentially in approximately 38.72187948226929 seconds :p

Reddit urls are still showing an error, but I’ll leave them in for now and keep an eye out for posts… or the lack of them.

And if you’ve got this far; apologies for the spam feed, but it’s there for my use and entertainment