The Daily Chump Bot

Introduction

The Daily Chump Bot is an IRC bot which allows you to create a collaborative weblog from IRC chat. Using it is easy: just cut and paste a URL into the channel and then add comments using a simple label.

This page gives you a quick summary, if you want more detail then Edd Dumbill has written an article for WebReview explaining the workings of the Chump: Running a Weblog from IRC.

Here's an example of using the Chump:

<ircuser> http://xmlhack.com/
-dc- A: http://xmlhack.com/ from ircuser
<ircuser> A:|An excellent XML site
-dc- titled item A
<ircuser> A:Daily news for XML developers
-dc- commented item A

The Chump produces an XML file per day. Some suitable server side magic might style that XML into something like this:

An excellent XML site
posted by ircuser at 2001-03-16 00:09
ircuser: Daily news for XML developers

Downloading and installing

You'll need Python 2.2 or better to run the bot, as well as Twisted 1.3 and, optionally, Quixote. The current version is 2.0 (17 September 2005). Download the distribution here. Installation instructions are contained in the archive. A ChangeLog is available, showing most recent changes to the software.

Manual

Full instructions are available in the distribution. We've also put the user manual online.

Credits

The Chump is based on an original idea by Bijan Parsia. Bijan wrote a bot in Squeak called DiaWebLogBot, which powers the Monkeyfist Daily Churn. We stole all his good ideas.

Matt Biddulph did the Python programming. Edd Dumbill did the XSLT and web server work, and more recently some Python too. Giles Turnbull wrote the first version of the manual. Matt Hunt encouraged, hooted and generally made us laugh. Phil McCarthy made some great suggestions.

Chumps we know of

If you're running a Chump bot, let us know by sending us mail. If it's public we'll link to it. Here are the bots we know of so far.