https://twitter.com/OldestLivingBot
Watch Wikipedia's list of oldest living people in a periodic job. Tweet when there's a new oldest person.
This topic has always fascinated me and been a reminder of our own mortality. For instance, as of a few years ago, we no longer had anyone alive who was born in the 19th century.
The logic is keep a database of the birthdays we have seen at the top spot of the oldest person list. We also record how many times we have seen each birthdate, and whether we have tweeted about it. The job runs on a cron. To ensure we don't tweet about temporary page vandalism, keep a count of how many times the cron has seen this birthday and tweet if it's been seen a sufficient number of times.
Here is a reference used on basic web scraper.
Install poetry
cp .env.example .env and fill in the parameters
poetry install from repo root. I used Python 3.9.
poetry run python index.py
The app used to run on Heroku when it had a free tier, but now it runs as a Google Cloud Function.