Read on Twitter
In honor of it reaching 100 followers and being in service for nearly a year, here's a little bit about one of my favorite projects for the past year, Toad Facts at @toadfacts1
Last year, during the beginning of the panic around covid-19 and our decision to pretty much sequester ourselves from the rest of the world I found myself needing something to occupy my brain in the evenings.
I remembered this tweet from my friend @komara https://twitter.com/komara/status/1154580739758972935
I remembered reading it and thinking that it would make my day if someone started randomly sending me toads.
I remembered reading it and thinking that it would make my day if someone started randomly sending me toads.
So, for his birthday (it turned out I was early, but that's beside the point) I started sending him toads from one of my Google Voice numbers so he wouldn't know it was me.
After several days of sending toads to Kevin, he mentioned that other people were interested in receiving toads as well, and I figured moving things over to a Twitter account would be easier than keeping track of people's numbers.
Now, I'm never been very good at keeping myself to a schedule, so I figured it would be a good idea to make a bot or something to ensure that Toad Facts were released in a timely manner.
I'd never made a successful Twitter bot (I had previously tried once, unsuccessfully), but I had a Raspberry Pi sitting over here not doing anything, so I figured I'd take a crack at it.
After an evening of poking around in Python, I had a working bot that would send a photo and Fact once a day. Not too shabby. I've made a few improvements since then. Also, since then I've made a few more Twitter bots, just for fun.
I now sit down about once a week and "load toads" for the bot to post. I've also made a style guide to remind me how to do things, or to let someone else know if I ever decide to hand it off. It contains things like always using exclamation points because toads are exciting!
When I started I was only collecting toads with photos that were available via Creative Commons licenses, but recently I've had fun sending emails back and forth to herpetologists (in my head they're always Toad Scientists) to get permission to use their images.
It's been one of my favorite things for the past year and has definitely kept my hands busy. I'm sure my friends and family are absolutely tired of hearing about it at this point, but so far everyone is still amusing me and feigning interest. So, that's good.
Anyway, if you haven't seen it already go check it out at @toadfacts1. Toads are cool.
