Colorblind Twitterbot

This is a Twitterbot written in node.js. It is designed to run a single Twitter account. The bot...

• Listens for Tweets sent directly to the bot which contain images.
• Downloads the first such image.
• Converts each pixel to an approximated pixel that a protan (red-green colorblind) individual would see.
• Re-uploads the image on behalf of the authenticated user.
• Sends a response Tweet on behalf of the authenticated user. The tweet is a reply to the original Tweet, and references the uploaded image.

Running the bot

Prerequisites

Once you have a Twitter handle, you need the following four strings so that OAuth will work:

• The application token.
• The application token secret.
• The user token.
• The user token secret.

The application token pair is given to you when you create your application at the Twitter developer's site. The easiest way to get the user token pair is by using the tokens provided to developers. Otherwise, you'll need to use something like twurl to do PIN-based authorization. I haven't automated this yet, sorry!

Copy ./src/config.js.template to ./src/config.js, and fill in all of the strings with real values.

Testing and running the bot

# Performs type-checking and runs all tests.
$ ./build.sh

# Performs type-checking, runs all tests, and runs the program.
$ ./bot.sh

Purpose

This bot was written by me, Jake Voytko ([email protected]), for a Queens JS talk, "I am colorblind, and so can you!" It is designed to teach others about how colorblindness functions by producing pictures that shows them, and additionally providing code so the process can be understood algorithmically. This is also to teach me how node.js works.

Accordingly, don't use this as a template for other Twitterbots. At the very least, you should swap out the OAuth functions with an OAuth library, since I rolled these by hand to learn how OAuth works.

External dependencies

• Facebook Flow for static type checking.
• LWIP to handle image encoding/decoding.
• Facebook jstransform to strip the inline type checking information.
• Mocha for testing.

Code organization

• ./src/color/protanope.js: Contains #convertToProtanope. This contains contains all of the high-level logic for converting a single pixel to its colorblind version.
• ./src/twitterbot.js: The entry point. Defines the processing pipeline and runs it.
• Everything else: Utilities of various persuasions.