I like the idea of having Reddit and Hacker News links appear in my Twitter feed, but all the bots that I have found so far are too high volume and just dominate my feed. Therefore I decided to write my own.

TopOnHN: A bot that tweets each article that reaches the number one spot on Hacker News

TopOnReddit: A bot that tweets each link that reaches the top 15 on Reddit

The bots mush abide by the following laws

• Never tweet the same article twice
• Use bit.ly to shorten urls
• Protect its own existance as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws

The first step was to register the Twitter accounts and apps. This is a fairly strait forward process. The only step that required some intellect was authenticating the app for the twitter account, but helpfully, twitter has set up a 1 click oauth login for an app that is connected to a twitter account (found at the bottom of the main app page).

To handle twitter access, I decided to use the ntwitter module as it seems to be the most up to date, and also the bitly module to shorten the urls (for this you also need to setup a bit.ly account and obtain an API key).

So… here is the code:

The entire process is wrapped in a single function, which is triggered using setInterval every x seconds. A request is made to the reddit API and on receiving a status 200 response the data is extracted and parsed.

The script then takes the top x tweets, checks their score threshold and timestamp, and then generates bit.ly urls for the links and comments. Once all this has been put together, the tweet is posted. Simples!