Yoan Blanc’s weblog

A while ago, I’ve already played with this kind of tool that looks to be magical. A remote bot that will do some action for you, to communicate with him, you just have to fire up your favorite Instant Messaging software talk with him. How many times a day you do so with your work mates asking little things? I’ll present a bot for Tumblr (yes it already exists, but it’s closed source and for AOL only), it enables you to post easily 4 of the 7 items you can post on Tumblr (mainly due to my laziness). The result is on my temporary Tumblr.

First of all, I’ve chosen Twisted instead of XMPPPy (like Thomas Perl’s Jabberbot) because Twisted contains support for many other protocols like IRC, OSCAR (ICQ) or MSN which could be useful if you need them as well.

Let’s do a very simple bot (the same I did before):

from jabberbot import JabberBot

class DumbBot(JabberBot):
 def gotMessage(self, jid, msg, resource):
  words = msg.split(" ")
  words.reverse()
  self.sendMessage(jid, " ".join(words))

print "DumbBot running, hit Ctrl+C to quit"
DumbBot("greutly@swissjabber.ch", PASSWORD).run()
		

This bot only handle message type of data, feel free to extend it.

To Post on Tumblr, it was required to create a Tumblr client that will take advantage of their REST API which is very simple.

A simple usage of it:

from tumblr import Tumblr, Regular

hello_world = Regular("Hello World!")
blog = Tumblr("greut", EMAIL, PASSWORD)
blog.post(hello_world)

You can also post Quotes, Conversations and Links at the moment.

Now mix the Jabber and the Tumblr things together:

from tumblr import Tumblr, Regular
from jabberbot import JabberBot

class TumblrBot(JabberBot):
 def __init__(self, jid, password, tumblr):
  super(TumblrBot, self).__init__(jid, password)
  self.tumblr = tumblr

 def gotMessage(self, jid, msg, resource):
  post = Regular(msg)
  self.tumblr.post(post)
  self.sendMessage(jid, "posted %s" % \
   self.tumblr.get_url(post))

blog = Tumblr("greut", EMAIL, PASSWORD)

print "TumblrBot running, hit Ctrl+C to quit"
TumblrBot("greutly@swissjabber.ch", PASSWORD, blog).run()

Et voilà, you’ve just posted on Tumblr via Jabber. The above code is the minimal code to achieve this kind of sweetness. The bot (tumblr.tgz) supports more actions and format types.

Going further: you can have a Jabber client on your Blackberry, your iPhone, simple and lightweight that is already heavily used by applications like Remember the Milk or Twitter. The SwissJabber guy made some bots for: the meteo, for asking a phone number, a whois, etc. Most of the time, web applications offer a IM interface, Tumblr does, but internal tools don’t, internal entities to your company for example or relative to your datas you may not want external companies look at. Their is a field of exploration here. Unwanted IM are more disruptive than unwanted emails, but the cool thing with a IM bot is that it knows if you’re either online, away or not and can acting accordingly to this.

A Doodle like that is IM powered for simple and very important things like: “where are we eating today?” One of the most recurrent question inside a company before lunch time. Many things are doable in this area and it’s easy.