My original path for automating the reviving of older blog posts & Open Source Projects I develop was using AppVeyor in a CI pipeline within a GitHub repository. You can find details about this process here: https://letsautomate.it/article/using-github-to-revive-blog-posts/
Recently I wanted to also share out, randomly and on a scheduled basis, open-source projects & blog posts to both Twitter & LinkedIn. This repository contains Python code to do just that using GitHub Actions.
This repository contains code to revive or re-share blog posts & open-source projects to Twitter & LinkedIn on a scheduled basis. There are two workflow files. blogs.yml and projects.yml
This new method is actually using Python and will run on a scheduled basis. The schedule is based on a cron job defined within my GitHub Action workflow. Blogs Yaml & Projects Yaml
An example can be found below yml file is below with comments explaining the process:
name: CI
on:
schedule: # Defining that I want this workflow to run on a schedule
- cron: "0 21,13 * * *" # Defining the schedule to run (21 & 13 UTC every day)
push: # I am also defining that I want pushes to master to run this workflow here
branches:
- master
jobs:
build: #you can define different stages but lets just keep it to this build stage for now
runs-on: ubuntu-latest # The base image to use you can find more info here about the available runners here: https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/virtual-environments-for-github-hosted-runners
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2 # using the latest version of github actions which checkouts the code in the repository
- name: Installing setup-tools # Giving this step a name
run: sudo apt-get install python3-setuptools # what to run in this step
- name: Install requirements # again a name is given for this step
run: pip3 install -r requirements.txt # and what to run
- name: Run script
env: # This is the important part - storing your secrets in your github account and accessing them here which sets them as environmental variables
TWITTER_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_TOKEN }}
TWITTER_SECRET_KEY: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_SECRET_KEY }}
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET }}
run: python3 run.py # now let's run our code to scrape, parse, and submit to Twitter using the above API keysIf you read the previous blog post you will know you need to create an App in Twitter and then generate a Token, Secret Key, Access Token, and Access Secret keys in order to use and post to Twitter via their APIs.
For LinkedIn, you must authenticate using OAuth2. Please read the documentation about Signing In with LinkedIn for more information.
You will need to generate a client_id and client_secret from LinkedIn. Additionally, if you want this process to automatically authenticate you via a browser using their Client Credential Grant Flow (which requires selenium & chromedriver to be installed) then you must provide your username & password to linkedin as well. If not, then generate an access_token and provide this.
Once you have done that then you need to store them in your GitHub account (DO NOT STORE THEM IN THE CLEAR!)
You can find info here about this process: https://help.github.com/en/actions/configuring-and-managing-workflows/creating-and-storing-encrypted-secrets
Basically, go to your repository and click on Settings and then click Secrets. Give each of the environmental variables a name and the value will be your key value
TWITTER_TOKEN = ''
TWITTER_SECRET_KEY = ''
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN = ''
TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET = ''
LINKEDIN_CLIENT_ID = ''
LINKEDIN_CLIENT_SECRET = ''
LINKEDIN_USERNAME = ''
LINKEDIN_PASSWORD = ''
LINKEDIN_ACCESS_TOKEN = '' # Optional
This project utilizes Python to parse a given HTML page and create formatted twitter posts from this data and then post them to Twitter.
This code is specifically looking for certain pieces of information within the HTML content so you will need to modify it to fit your needs.
To start, modify the get_data() method to retrieve the data you want. Next you will need to modify how the data is formatted as well, but I leave this all to you.
Another update