I have made many “Tweet bots” over the last year, but I’m just now getting around to sharing.

One of the simplest ones I have created is the “current conditions” auto-tweet. It simply scrapes the weather observation data from the NWS website and then tweets it out.

I have the R script set up to run in batch mode a couple of times a day (times specified by me in my Task Scheduler).

You must first create an app in Twitter via the Twitter Developer Website.

You must then obtain a consumer key and secret. Here is a good how-to.

Play around with the R Twitter package (twitteR) and familiarize yourself with its functions.

I use the httr package for Twitter Authentication.

### ###This script will scrape the latest conditions from the NWS for KPBI and ###tweet out the current conditions including an image of sky cover. ### ###Have to first go through all the twitter stuff: require(twitteR) library(httr) library(stringr) library(rvest) require(httpuv) #detach("package:Rfacebook", unload=TRUE) # returns string w/o leading or trailing whitespace trim % html() %>% html_nodes(xpath = "/html/body/table") %>% html_table(fill = TRUE) tables tables[[4]] data % html_nodes("#current-conditions-body img") %>% html_attr("src") link = paste("http://forecast.weather.gov/", image_url, sep = '') download.file(link, destfile = "C:/Users/Lisa/Desktop/currents/currents.png", mode = "wb") #Set some conditions for the text. if(current.temp >= 90 & current.dp > 69){a</pre> Once you've got this done, you'll need to set up a batch file. I do this by creating a new R script (within Rstudio) and typing the following: <pre> "C:\Program Files\R\R-3.1.2\bin\x64\R.exe" CMD BATCH "C:\Users\Lisa\Desktop\currents\currents.r"

Then, save this file as a '.bat' file instead of a '.r' file - this is very simple to do in Rstudio. (I don't know about the R console...)

It is this '.bat' file that you will want to trigger using your computer's task scheduler.