Automatically Posting Events To Instagram
by Ryder (calm down)Facebook's graph API is possibly the worst thing I've dealt with in years. Unfortunately, it's a necessary evil.
I want to meet users where they are - a daily story update to instagram.com/outandabout_toronto indicating the events that are happening today/tomorrow.
How It Works
Using a pipeline that took me a literal full-day to build, the following happens:
- Events for the day are gathered
- Events are displayed and rendered onto a page that's a lot more pretty than the normal site (colourful)
- A selenium docker image snags a screenshot of the page, with the appropriate dimensions for instagram
- The screenshot is uploaded to a public location
- The graph API authenticates using OAuth credentials
- The story gets posted
Now I've got a whole new problem on my hands, growing an instagram following (and not getting banned, which Facebook's AI pipeline loves to do).
