The latest articles on Forem by Stepn Alien 👽 (💙,🧡) 🔥 (@stepnalien). https://forem.com/stepnalien https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3614499%2Ff4793246-1237-44a9-831c-6f750ddd5d70.jpg https://forem.com/stepnalien en Stepn Alien 👽 (💙,🧡) 🔥 Mon, 17 Nov 2025 03:46:57 +0000 https://forem.com/stepnalien/i-built-earthquaketoday-a-247-multi-platform-bot-in-python-in-its-first-month-its-served-3k-3ob7 https://forem.com/stepnalien/i-built-earthquaketoday-a-247-multi-platform-bot-in-python-in-its-first-month-its-served-3k-3ob7 <p><strong>The Problem</strong></p> <p>I've always been frustrated by how difficult it is to get simple, real-time earthquake data. Most news sites are slow, cluttered with ads, and make it hard to find the basic info you need.</p> <p><strong>My philosophy is that essential safety data should always be free and hassle-free.</strong></p> <p>The Solution: A Bot &amp; A Website</p> <p>So, I decided to build a complete, end-to-end solution to solve this. My project has two parts:</p> <p><strong>The Website:</strong> <a href="https://earthquaketoday.org" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://earthquaketoday.org</a><br> <strong>A clean, fast, 100% ad-free site for viewing real-time earthquake data on an interactive map.</strong></p> <p>The Bot: A 24/7 Python bot that automates everything.</p> <p><strong>How the Bot Works</strong> (The Tech Stack)</p> <p>This was the fun part! I built the bot in Python, running 24/7 on an Ubuntu VPS, managed by pm2.</p> <p>Every 3 minutes, the bot's job queue fires and it:</p> <p><strong>Fetches Data:</strong> Scrapes the latest 1-hour feed from the official USGS API.</p> <p><strong>Filters Data:</strong> Ignores any quake below M1.5 and checks against a local JSON file to prevent posting duplicates.</p> <p><strong>Posts to Socials:</strong></p> <p>Formats and posts an alert to Telegram (using python-telegram-bot).</p> <p>Formats a different, more engaging post (with dynamic location hashtags!) to X/Twitter (using tweepy).</p> <p>Posts to my official Facebook Page (using the facebook-sdk).</p> <p><strong>Pings for SEO:</strong> This is my favorite part. The instant a new quake is posted, the bot automatically pings IndexNow (both Bing and Yandex) with the new earthquaketoday.org URL. This gets the new quake page indexed by search engines in minutes.</p> <p>The bot is also interactive! I built in command handlers so users can DM the bot and get the latest quake info on demand.</p> <p><strong>The Result (So Far)</strong></p> <p>I'm humbled to see that in just its first month, with no promotion other than its own automated posts, the site has already served nearly 3,000 visitors! <br> <a href="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Ff4v6xrb5tcping1h9o8p.png" class="article-body-image-wrapper"><img src="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Ff4v6xrb5tcping1h9o8p.png" alt="ErthaquakeToday traffic info by Semrush " width="800" height="248"></a></p> <p>It feels great to build a tool like <a href="https://earthquaketoday.org" rel="noopener noreferrer">Earthquake Today</a> that people are genuinely finding useful.</p> <p>What do you think? I'd love to hear any feedback from the dev community!</p> showdev python webdev devjournal