Today, a Trove API upgrade, or to be more precise, the decomissioning of the old API, briefly broke Trove Air Bot (and all the other Trove bots). Fortunately Tim Sherratt worked out a solution, and Trove Air Bot is now back in action with all new code, which (with slightly more useful comments) can be found here. Probably nobody noticed anything other than me -- except for when the bot blasted out a few dozen tweets in the space of a few minutes while I was editing the project! Sorry about that...

Bonus! The bot still does basically the same thing as originally, and its tweets look much the same; but it now uses a wider range of keywords, rather than just one. Whereas version 1 searched for newspaper articles containing 'aviation' (or variants, such as 'aviator'), it now randomly searches on one of the following:


aeronautics
aeroplane
aircraft
airplane
airship
aviation
balloon
helicopter

I could have added others, particularly for the aircraft. An obvious one is 'plane', but this gets hundreds of thousands of results every decade in the second half of the 19th century, which will be nothing to do with aviation. (This could be a problem with 'balloon', too.) Conversely I could have included words like 'Zeppelin' or 'autogyro', but that becomes a question of diminishing returns (where do you stop? 'ornithopter'? 'ekranoplan'?? 'vimana'???), and given that the selection of keywords isn't weighted in any way I don't want the results to be dominated by a weird, long tail. The above set of keywords should capture a high proportion of the kind of articles I'm looking for, while remaining reasonably coherent. Hopefully!

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