This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Robby Russell. Original Post: rbot is cool Feed Title: Robby on Rails Feed URL: http://www.contegix.com/rss/feed.xml Feed Description: My reflections on programming with Ruby, Rails, PostgreSQL... and learning how to run a business... Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Robby Russell Latest Posts From Robby on Rails

This weekend, I found myself helping the Portland Ruby Brigade get setup with a new mailing list and while in our IRC channel (#pdx.rb on freenode), I was reminded that we never setup a bot in the channel. So, I went and tried to get Eggdrop running but didn’t like that the configuration file is a whopping 1342 lines long. Seriously… it’s long. I am a busy person right now and this was instantly a turn-off. So, i looked around for ruby based ones… found a few python ones and found rbot

yes… a ruby-based irc bot!

SVN checked it out… added the few deps and the configuration file…

--- 
irc.nick: pdxrbot
core.address_prefix:
  - "?"
irc.user: pdxruby
server.name: irc.freenode.net
auth.password: ******
irc.join_channels:
  - "#pdx.rb"       

Yes! YAML!

It ran right away…and I was sold. Nice work. (and only about 1330 lines less of configuration!)

So, it was up and running and then I looked at the plugins api. (huge grin)

I’ve added two plugins to the #pdx.rb bot already. One for rubyurl (uses shorturl) and one that shows the last 5 entry titles from the planet rubyonrails site. :-)

We’re already scheming how we’ll make it work with meeting reminders, subversion, and other random fun. I’m quite impressed so far.

Check it out here