• What is it
• SVG and dynamic content
• Image twitter bot tutorials

Cheap Bots, Done Quick! is a platform for generative Twitter bots.

It uses Tracery to generate content from JSON source.

At it's simplest, it turns this:

{
  "origin" : "Hello World"
}

into this:

Hello World

Tokens (wrapped with a hash like #this#) are expanded from this:

{
  "origin" : "Hello #planets#",
  "planets" : ["Mercury", "Venus", "Mars", "Earth"]
}

into any of these (it picks a value randomly each time it runs):

Hello Mercury
Hello Venus
Hello Mars
Hello Earth

Now plain text tweets are great, but the reason that I love Cheap Bots Done Quick is that you can create and tweet images using SVG. Also, you can create dynamic content using Javascript in SVG - for example, writing the date, or loading external content.

Here are a few bots that use SVG to create random images

@sadkeanubot	@badphotoquality	@time4gametheory	@shakyinsultbot
places a pic of Sad Keanu on a random photo of a chair	applies blur or posterise filter to worsen a photo and overlays the date	overlays the "Guys, it's time..." text on a random New Yorker cartoon	generates Shakespeare insults
view the source	view the source	view the source	view the source

• Creating image bots using SVG and Tracery
• Make your own New Yorker cartoon Twitter bot

• Making twitter bots with Tracery and CheapBotsDoneQuick
• Make your own @hydratebot: a tutorial for non-coders