Making Spam Cool Again

I’m an information junky. I spend hours a day on Twitter, Hacker News, UseVim, Giant Robots, DailyJS — if it’s about developer-anything, I’m there. So I decided to share the wealth of links that I visit on a daily basis with the world.

Introducing spamthe.net — my very own link spammer. Follow on twitter (@spamthenet), bookmark in your browser (spamthe.net) *, subscribe to the weekly newsletter (here), or join the IRC channel on Freenode (#spamthenet).

The links themselves can be found easily by anyone else who is as obsessed with the above-mentioned resources as I am. But the fun part was building it.

I use GitHub Pages to host the site and a node.js app to update twitter and the blog simultaneously. Oh, and I wrote a bookmarklet so that I can just click a button from within a site and send it to the spammer.

The node app listens for a request (CORS of course) from the bookmarklet. The title and url are passed in the request, and the app posts to the twitter account and writes a new file into the website’s repo, commits, and pushes to GitHub. Now I can share links with the click of a button. Copy + paste is so 2013.

The IRC channel is running a version of hubot that listens to spamthenet’s Twitter stream and auto-posts the links. Join the channel if you feel like chatting with cool people while you wait for the links to pour in.

Click here to check out the awful source. If you’re interested in helping me collect links, ping me on IRC (tybenz) or Twitter (@tybenz) and be sure to check the contributing section of the README.

Also don’t forget to bookmark spamthe.net, sign up for our newsletter, follow @spamthenet, and join us on IRC. Or maybe just one of those, if you feel doing all of them would be redundant.

* I know the site has spam in the title. So here’s a screenshot for all you out there who are too scared to actually click on the link: