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🤖 Tidyverse News Twitter Bot

This bot scrapes updates about tidyverse packages from GitHub and posts them to twitter 🚀

❓ How does it work?

  1. NEWS.md files are scraped from GitHub for all the packages listed by tidyverse::tidyverse_packages()

  2. Annotations are applied to these files using pandoc with a custom Lua filter. Annotations indicate where bullets begin and end so that tweets can be grouped together sensibly.

  3. This data is transformed using R to give individual tweets or threads where bullets would otherwise overflow. The twitter-text javascript library is used here to test whether tweets are valid or not.

  4. Updates which have already been posted are excluded by checking against a CSV database. Updates don't have to exactly match previously posted ones - if they're very similar to previously posted updates, they won't get posted again.

  5. Tweets are posted using the {rtweet} package

This is all automated using GitHub Actions, which simply sources run.R once every hour.

❓ Why?

If you use R a lot it's interesting to see what features are in the works for popular packages. I also wanted to learn more about twitter bots and GitHub actions, so this seemed like a good learning exercise.

📦 Packages

See R/news_urls.R for the full list of packages this bot follows. If you think any are missing, please open an issue on GitHub or send me a message on twitter 🚀