Basic Mastodon bots

So I have a couple of Mastodon "bots" (automated accounts). They do not do much.
They just watch for never version of various software and post if a new version
appears. An example being the following which tracks a handful of desktop web
browsers:

~ @browserversiontracker@vivaldi.net:
https://social.vivaldi.net/@browserversiontracker

I just thought I would explain how it works as it is actually fairly simple. I
located various public sources for the current version number for a given piece
of software. For Google I would use the Google versions json information and
construct a URL like this.

~ Google Linux stable versions [json]:
https://versionhistory.googleapis.com/v1/chrome/platforms/linux/channels/stable/versions

Or for Firefox versions I would use this.

~ Firefox versions [json]:
https://product-details.mozilla.org/1.0/firefox_versions.json

Once I have good sources of reliable information for all the software I wish to
track I setup a shell script that pulls them using curl. This information is
then parsed with local tools. That can be a tool dedicated to the format the
information is published in or at a push I could just use a regex to extract
what I need with things like grep and sed. Once I have version numbers for each
software I compare them with file on disk that has the version numbers I already
knew about. If there are any new versions a post is created and posted with Toot
TUI and I update the local file.

~ Toot - a Mastodon CLI client:
https://github.com/ihabunek/toot

There is a little error handling (e.g. for cases where I have trouble getting
information due to stuff like network problems) but basically... that's it!

At the end of the day it is the authors of the various tools I use who have done
all the hard work, I just tie it all together with "duct tape" (well a tiny
shell script) that is run regularly on a cron job from my work machine (since
that is always on anyway).

I don't know if this is helpful to anyone, or if anyone will ever read this but
if it is and you do, there you go. ;)

-- 

Mastodon: @ruari@velocipederider.com