About

Twitter doesn't let you make your avatar a GIF.

But that doesn't mean your avatar can't be "animated"!

With gifatar, you can have your avatar update like a GIF over an extended period of time. When you look at your profile, you see a different frame each time, much like seeing the hands of a clock be in a different position when you glance up after a few hours – a slow web experience.

Run Your Own

1. Make sure you have node and npm installed.
2. Clone or fork this repo. git clone https://github.com/billdybas/gifatar.git
3. Make a .env file. cp .env-sample .env
4. Place the GIF you'd like to use in images/.
5. Create a new Twitter app at https://apps.twitter.com/. Twitter will generate a Consumer Key and Consumer Secret. Make sure to also generate an Access Token and Access Token Secret at https://apps.twitter.com/app/<app_id>/keys. Put these in your .env.
6. Fill in the other appropriate environment variables:

• IMAGE_PATH: (string, required) Path of the GIF to use relative to the images/ directory
• TWITTER_TIMEOUT: (number, optional, default: 1 minute) HTTP request timeout to Twitter
• IMAGE_UPDATE_INTERVAL: (number, optional, default: 60 minutes) How often to update the profile image
• VERBOSE: (boolean, optional, default: false) Whether to run in verbose mode

7. npm install
8. npm start

Deployment

If you need a quick and easy way to deploy this bot, check out now.

Resources

• Twitter's Rules & Best Practices
• Twitter's Automation Rules
• Twitter's API Docs
• POST account/update_profile_image Docs
• Twitter's Rate Limiting
• How to Make a Twitter Bot
• Bot Hosting

License

See LICENSE.md

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Built during Brickhack 4 by Bill Dybas.