Bit of Background
I’m a part of a writing cohort called Ship 30 for 30. The idea is that you write every day for 30 days, and publish using a specific platform (Typeshare), which then gets shared to Twitter.
In this particular round, there are quite a few participants. I wanted an easier way to see all the essays they were creating so I came up with the idea to build a Twitter “Bot” that would tweet out links to everyone’s essay, making it easily scannable.
Here’s how I did it:
1) Trigger the Automation: Tweet in List
Everyone in the cohort is a member of a particular list in Twitter, so I was able to trigger my Zap when anyone in the list sends a tweet. There are a LOT of irrelevant tweets so I needed a way to make sure the automation only continued when I wanted it to.
![](https://uploads-us-west-2.insided.com/zapier-ca/attachment/b350425c-c50d-414a-964b-b92740b51693.png)
2) Filter (Check That Something Exists)
When the tweet is one that I want to process, there are a couple of fields that will contain specific values:
![](https://uploads-us-west-2.insided.com/zapier-ca/attachment/2042d66f-f04d-4e55-8b3b-261cbf76393a.png)
I check a hyperlink to see if it contains the two values shown in the photo. If so, on to the next step :)
3) Web Parser by Zapier (beta): Parse Webpage
This is where lots of the magic happens. I then parse the page using the hyperlink from Twitter. This gives me information about the essay, for use in later steps.
![](https://uploads-us-west-2.insided.com/zapier-ca/attachment/b3f84399-91d2-4e57-902f-f2acf17a38f1.png)
4) Filter (Check That Something Doesn’t Exist)
In addition to the essays being shared from Typeshare, people had been sharing links to their social blogs, and I didn’t want those to be tweeted out by ShipperShare. Those would match the first filter, but then be caught by this one:
![](https://uploads-us-west-2.insided.com/zapier-ca/attachment/28d92b19-a0fe-4461-a5d9-219c8c00292a.png)
5) Twitter: Create Tweet
Now that I know I’ve got information about an essay (and not a link to someone’s blog), I can construct a tweet using the various pieces of data I’ve received in previous steps.
![](https://uploads-us-west-2.insided.com/zapier-ca/attachment/758d8ecd-e462-4cfe-96fb-4e7f13326c19.png)
BONUS) Airtable: Create Record
I have another workflow created for when the bot doesn’t capture the original tweet (doesn’t happen often but I like to be prepared). This adds a record in Airtable that I can then look up in that other Zap, to make sure it hasn’t been posted already. If it has, no need to send it again.
It’s not that I think anyone would abuse this. I just like to be thorough :)
Wrapping Up
Hopefully this has given you some ideas for how to build a curation bot of your own!