While on summer vacation, I updated Kathy’s Fan Script to use Twitter API 1.1, since they dropped sport for V1.0 right after her sat show.
After the update, she noticed some test SMS texts weren’t generating any sentences.
The script performs a twitter search on each significant word in the SMS entry. So, somebody texts “I am your maker and creator.” Insignificant words stripped (“am”,”your”,”and”), three twitter searches, one for “I”, one for “maker”, one for “creator.” Twitter, not being told otherwise, defaulted to returning just 15 tweets that forms the “seed” text for Wabby — but ONLY if that search term appeared in the test, CASE sensitive. So in this example, the seed would contain at most 45 tweets, skipping any where the search term was capitalized in any way.
The problem text she sent me were single word texts: summertime and ballons (not balloons). One word, one twitter search, 15 tweets, many containing “Summertime.” and thus skipped. Result: seed too small for Wabby to deal with, it spewed empty phrases.
Solution: I bumped up the returned tweet count to 50 per search. I remove the case-sensitive word match requirement.
More: stripped out #whatevers and @whoevers from tweets, fixed another bug I introduced that reset seed text between searches
