Now, I am trying to strategize a way to keep our account informed when major news sources release anything related to entrepreneurship or innovation which is what I was asked to do next.
My current idea is to have a dummy account (I can use the account I build for the test application) in order to follow all of those sources. I think it should run constantly, and when the timeline has a new item, the program will look at the content of the tweet and check for buzzwords. If the tweet does have buzzwords, it should direct message the BakerMcNair account a link to the tweet so that it can be considered.
11/8
Followed around 100 people. Purged the failures. I read my previous log where I said this should take around 1.5 hours for me to complete from here on and thought to myself "Why should it take any time??" I now want to change my program so that I constantly does what it does when I manually input usernames into it, without anything coming from me.
Here is the idea: At the very beginning of time, we will input one user into the Super Automatic Follower Program. It will crawl through it just how my old program did, following the good people BUT when it follows someone new, it will have to unfollow someone who didn't follow us back from a few hours ago as well (lots of checks in place). That way, we don't become one of those accounts that is following like THOUSANDS of people and is very obnoxious. If there isn't anyone from a few hours back, the program will sleep for 15 minutes and try again. ADDITIONALLY: while we are looking for people to follow, we will also check for new starting nodes. My criteria for a start node is someone who has 20 times the number of followers that they are following and uses at least five buzzwords in 20 tweets. This approximates what I look for when I am finding new start nodes manually. It will add this person to a list of people to crawl and get to them after we finish the follow/unfollow nonsense for the current start node. There is such a mind bogglingly huge number of things that could go wrong with this (probably why people don't usually build programs like this on their own and just buy them instead) that I will have to handle (RATE LIMITING FOR ONE -_- and also less annoying but equally problematic things like what do we do if we can't find a new start node? and the big fear that twitter will catch onto our nonsense and lock us out of our developer rights....) but I'm fairly certain it can be done, especially if the DM program I've got going on can work as well.
On the topic of the DM program, there is some weird error that occasionally happens where a link is bad, so the program refuses to DM us and shoots an error and then everything stops which is obviously not cool. I plan on fixing this (catch and try) and it shouldn't be a major hassle, but the issue is that I need an example of a link that is going wrong so I can build a test to check if it's fixed. I accidentally passed over the example from last week today and lost it, so now I have to let the program run until Thursday and hope that the error happens again.
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