The previous dictionary and thesaurus plugin was broken pretty much right after it was released, and I never went back to fix it. This one will break eventually, too; when reference.com does another redesign. Oh wells. this one works for now!
May
23
KDE4000 of irc.localcoast.net found me yesterday. That network is running a highly modified version of botzilla, which is exciting to see. localbot is superior to botzilla in a number of ways, so I hope I get to see more of its code.
He had thought that timed events for modules/ziggis were broken, and I wasn’t really sure because I don’t make much use of them. Let’s take a look.
Apr
30
Debuted at BarCamp Boston, the latest plugin for botzilla fetches RedSox scores and schedules from mlb.com using their available json data. If Boston is not your team, (I feel bad for you, but) you can probably recreate a similar plugin for your bot and your team.
Jan
11
botzilla source is free to anyone on botzilla.org, and has been downloaded 172 times at the time of this writing. But today, while working on the Bug Tracker plugin, I finally encountered an instance of botzilla that was not my own. The IP address tracked back to Turkey, and was idling in #botzilla under the nick notzilla (both defaults in my distribution). I noticed it when my test bot couldn’t connect using that name.
It was nice to see. Even though “the numbers” are there, it was comforting to see an actual bot. Cheers, Turkish guy.
About the data that I track about downloads – I keep only
* what file
* how many downloads
* last download date/time
I often check this page containing a php var_dump of that table’s contents.
Jan
11
botzilla, in my opinion, has become an critical utility at the company I work for, and is certainly plays a starring role in our company culture. But because botzilla is software, it has its bugs, and I sometimes forget what they are, or chose to ignore them. I (not-so-) jokingly asked the department if we should add botzilla as a product in our bugzilla implementation. The reply was kind of ‘meh’, and I didn’t force the issue. Instead, I approached botzilla in the usual fashion: write another plugin.
So that’s what I have for you (, I, and us) today! A simple little bug tracker that turns a description into a trackable item that can be assigned and passed around, resolved and reopened.
I really wrote it as a way to add and share internal botzilla bugs, but for your own implementation feel free to use it for whatever you want.
In case anyone might be wondering, for my own botzilla, the command “.bug” is already taken by own bugzilla search. I’ve not published that one because it’s ugly as sin and uses an htaccess method that I’ve not talked about on this site yet.
Top contributor, (and all around nice guy) Dave Gucwa quickly made some new entertainment for botzilla. First, a plugin that translates previous text into lolcat speak (SRY, BUT THX to http://speaklolcat.com). And next, a plugin that taps into Yahoo’s babelfish service to provide some “broken english” response.
These classes are easily modifiable, and are great examples of using web services to scrape data from the web to throw back into IRC. In particular, the method of mixing wget and grep instead of file_get_contents (as I tend to do)
$cmd = ‘wget -O – “http://somesite.com” 2>/dev/null | grep “something”‘;
$result = utf8_decode(`$cmd`);
A while ago, Tristan Schneiter wrote a Google Calendar plugin for botzilla that displays, searches, and allows us to add events to the many calendars that we use around the office. After a few revisions, we feel that it’s ready to be shared with the rest of the botzilla using world (we know you’re out there).
Nov
05
Election day couldn’t have been better here in the States, and the party seemed to be in our IRC channel.
We watched the votes come in from several sources, including Google, but what
intrigued me most that night was that their HTML source contained no data – just the layout. I had to find the source.
As an honest to goodness javascript junkie, I found (with help from firebug’s NET pane) that the vote data was being imported with a JSON
object every few minutes, and I was able to listen in.
Friend and contributor, Dave Gucwa (Dav), has added some convenience and compatibility to his personal instance of botzilla that has me convinced that it’d be useful to the public at large (With 100 downloads of botzilla 0.31, I consider this large).
If anyone has downloaded this bot, and received a server message to the sound of “um, hey, your client may not work here”, than this article is for you!
Sep
07
I finally sat down and did something for botzilla that I’ve been meaning to do
for a long time, a multi-step Dialog. No branches or question requirements yet,
but I’m pleased enough with my first found use for it that I feel it’s releasable.
Dialog is an “outside” class (not a ziggi) that sits in botzilla/cls/ that ziggi
plugins can make use of to pose a series of questions to a user and store their
responses.