Hi, this is a fun lil bot that scrapes NYC MTA subway information for delays, and then posts the update to Threads. You can follow it at @nycsubwayalerts (including in the Fediverse!), and follow me at @ezra.
I made this in a couple days leveraging my shoddy knowledge of javascript and Cursor.sh / Claude Sonnet to work around what I don’t know. There was a lot of script monkey-ing here.
The bot has a few different components:
index.jscoordinates the whole thingsubway.jsgrabs realtime data from MTA's json and filters to just delays from the last 5 minutesthreads.jshandles creating and posting to threads.
And then the bot itself is run via cron job on Render.com that's triggered every 5 minutes. Environment variables (including Threads API keys) are handled there. I tried to do it via GitHub Actions but it turns out cron job scheduling is quite unreliable. Ultimately each run takes about 20 seconds, so hosting this should cost under $3 a month or so.
The data is based on JSON from MTA (because the real-time standard GTFS seems deeply complicated). The source for that is here.
Cool! I don’t know why you’d want to fork this, but please feel free and use this however you’d like.
Things to know:
- Threads API requires a Meta developer account. Their documentation is decent.
- The Threads token expires every 60 days. I need to add a cron job that exchanges it on Day 59 or something.
- The hardest part of Threads for me is that there’s no web-based account switching. So because I didn’t want to test on my own @ezra account, I had to create a new Threads account, log out, and then also provision it as a test user and accept the invitation within the developer hub. This was all a bit heavy for my taste, but it’s a new API and Meta is a big company, so /shrug.