@MotivateMeBot is currently hosted on Heroku, running regularly using a scheduler. The bot selects images from Unsplash's excellent collection of high quality, royalty-free photos, via their API service. And of course, it uses the Twitter API to find tweets and post new remixed images.
To select an image, the bot first analyzes a couple positions for the quote (top and middle of image) and determines if the pixels at either position has a good distribution of relative luminance. The bot may have to try multiple images before it selects one that passes the thresholds defined in the script.
Then, the bot selects quotes using a few language filters and does a bit of processing to format the text more appropriately for the image (e.g. removing hashtags, adding relevant punctuation, etc.). With a finalized quote, the text color is selected and the quote is arranged to maximize contrast with the background photo. In addition, the background image is blurred slightly (in a gradient manner, so that the boundary of the blurring region is hard to distinguish) to further enhance legibility.
After all of this processing, the bot pushes the remix to Twitter with image and quote credits -- hopefully having successfully generated an inspiring picture!
Example scripts are located in scripts/. Specifically, create_image_local.py runs the tweet scraping / image & text editing pipeline.
To run on your local machine, you'll need a Twitter Developer account and place the (4) keys in a file called keys.py within the motivatemebot/ directory. In addition, you can sign up for an Unsplash account for access to their API as well (and place those keys in keys.py as well.
Credits for Twitter picture backgrounds (via Unsplash):
- Profile picture: John Rodenn Castillo
- Cover photo: Fezbot2000