rjayb89 posted a suggestion on the Bug Reporting forum about a having twitter account that would tweet when a live show is about to start. I found this to be a good idea, so I built a twitter bot that will tweet when a live is going to start soon and when it goes live.

Here it is: http://twitter.com/#!/GB_Live_Shows

It basically checks every 10 minutes to see if there is a countdown timer at the top of a page on GIant Bomb. If there is, it'll tweet that a live show is starting soon. Once the count down timer switches to saying it's live, it'll tweet again saying that the show is now live while also providing a link to the chat.

I'll eventually get the bot to tweet all the shows that happen on the rest of the whiskey sites.

Cool! Well done.

I get an email every time they go live

I get an email every time they go live

Pretty good idea, thanks

Wow, now my confusion is gone. Thanks!

Do they actually update the countdown timer when they decide to do a live stream right out of nowhere? Seems like the best notification is checking Ryan or Jeff's Twitter on a constant basis. They usually use bit.ly to link to giantbomb.com/chat at the end of every post.

Dude you rule.

AHHH!! There are....so many Daves. THEY WILL ENSLAVE US ALL!!! *tears off pants, runs around screaming*

Dude, fuck yes! Thanks a lot @Vager. I've been needing something like this since the new design launched. Now if I can just figure out how to make my phone notify me when it tweets.

That's pretty cool. If people want notifications via text they could set up SMS twitter notifications for that account too.

@Vager: Awesome work!

This gets a thumbs up.

Thanks. I usually see every live show pop up, but somehow I've missed the last three streams in a row. This should help.

I like this.

Nice going! I try to put live stuff on the "upcoming" tab as soon as I know about it, but the more coverage it gets the better.

Great idea!

Great! Except I never check Twitter.

Great job Jeremy!

Now if there was a way it could say if it's Subscriber only then it would be perfect.

Well done, duder.

Very nice.

Thanks Vager. Getting a text when the bot detects a live stream is going to be great.

It's a very weird feeling unexpectedly getting a text message from your own creation .

fixed some issues with text spacing and html decoding showing up on some tweet delivery systems.

Very cool. Is there a reason it didn't tweet about the Random PC Game live stream today? Also - can we get it working for the other sites (specifically, Tested)?

Great work.

@mostman: It did tweet about about the Random PC Game stream, both before and after it went live.

I have the thing built to check Tested and Screened streams, but I want to test it before I put it live. Last thing I want is to mistakenly start spamming people who set it to receive text messages from the bot. I'm waiting for another Whiskey wide stream to happen. Probably will be at the Radio Show at the end of the month.

@Vager: Hmm.. odd. When I checked it right after I made that post, the last tweet was the one about the NBA2k 12. I remember noticing that it was missing because that Random PC stream had already ended. Wish I took a screen shot of it.

Thanks a lot, I'm getting the tweets sent to my phone.