Python Twisted IRC Bot: Lazy Coder

A friend pointed me to this simple yet humorous website yesterday which essentially gives a new lazy coder excuse whenever the page is refreshed.

I couldn't help but whip out a bot to plug in to our IRC channel. My lazy coder bot will give a random excuse whenever someone mentions the word "why".

I used my Rollbot script as a base to write this up quickly.

requirements.txt

Twisted==13.1.0
beautifulsoup4==4.2.1
requests==1.2.3

because.py

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
from twisted.words.protocols import irc
from twisted.internet import protocol, reactor

NICK = '_lazy_coder_'
CHANNEL = '#yourchannel'
PASSWORD = 'channel_password'

class MyBot(irc.IRCClient):
    def _get_nickname(self):
        return self.factory.nickname
    nickname = property(_get_nickname)

    def signedOn(self):
        self.join(self.factory.channel)
        print "Signed on as {}.".format(self.nickname)

    def joined(self, channel):
        print "Joined %s." % channel

    def privmsg(self, user, channel, msg):
        """
        Whenever someone says "why" give a lazy programmer response
        """
        if 'why' in msg.lower():
            # get lazy response
            because = self._get_because()

            # post message
            self.msg(CHANNEL, because)

    def _get_because(self):
        req = requests.get('http://developerexcuses.com/')
        soup = BeautifulSoup(req.text)
        elem = soup.find('a')
        return elem.text.encode('ascii', 'ignore')

class MyBotFactory(protocol.ClientFactory):
    protocol = MyBot

    def __init__(self, channel, nickname=NICK):
        self.channel = channel
        self.nickname = nickname

    def clientConnectionLost(self, connector, reason):
        print "Lost connection (%s), reconnecting." % reason
        connector.connect()

    def clientConnectionFailed(self, connector, reason):
        print "Could not connect: %s" % reason

if __name__ == "__main__":
    channel = CHANNEL
    if PASSWORD:
        channel += ' {}'.format(PASSWORD)
    reactor.connectTCP('irc.freenode.net', 6667, MyBotFactory(channel))
    reactor.run()

UPDATE:

I've made some minor modifications and posted the project on Github