I currently run a “Twitter bot” called UK_News which pulls all the latest news from the BBC and broadcasts it over twitter.

Why bother?

The difference between my bot and the many others out there is mine does NOT chop up words or alter the story into unreadable garbage just to fit a link to the article into the post.

The only time a post will ever be logically edited (no half words for “exam…”!) is when 6 other logic checks fail.

v0.4 (28/11/2009)

Updated the “breaking news” section. Unfortunately the bot kept repeating breaking news which was no longer valid, several hours after the story had been released. This should no longer happen.

Also updated some of the reference code to lower processing power required, this should keep my host happy.

v0.3 (23/11/2009)

I’ve updated the logic to increase the amount of “useful” posts (ie, ones containing direct links to news articles).

After a quick calculation of past posts, for comparison:

• 69.76% of posts should now contain a full summary of the topic, inclusive of a direct link.
• 30.23% of posts should contain a reduced summary and direct link.
• 0.01% of all posts which do not fit in my logic will be posted without a direct link to the topic.

I’ve also fixed the breaking news feed, the BBC posts a breaking news announcement before their journalists have had chance to finish the story, therefore there is no direct link and as such, I’ve had to link all breaking news stories to the news front page.

v0.2 (21/11/2009)

I’ve added a few (5) more topics that UK_News follows.

I’ve also increased the logic in posting to twitter, it now goes through 5 or 6 checks on how to post the best content and will now utilise url shortening services if required to do so.

v0.1 (05/07/2009)

UK_News takes news from several different BBC RSS feeds and posts them every 30-60 seconds on twitter, all news is strictly UK only (no other reason than there are lots of Worldwide news bots).

A very basic system depicts whether it can send a link to a post (direct, unshortened) or whether the post requires shortening slightly.

Disclaimer stuff..

The bot was written by myself and is not available for release, however, should you have a need for such a bot or any reasonable requests or ideas, please feel free to contact me and I will take it from there.

While I run the link between [my] BBC News and Twitter, I cannot be held responsible for the accuracy or impact of any news posted using my bot, not all news topics are currently covered and I currently have no plans to cover all the topics the BBC cover as I don’t want the bot to spam posts every few seconds.

The bot is provided free for all to follow and will continue to run for as long as I or my host see fit.  UK_News is supported by backstage.bbc.co.uk