TalkDirty2Me

Updated Jun 13, 2024

TalkDirty2Me

A long time ago, someone discovered that on certain video websites, people leave unsavory yet very entertaining comments. This is a website that displays random samples of these through web scraping. Eventually someone suggested that it should have an appropriately sexy soundtrack. TalDirty2Me consists of a small SPA that talks to an API endpoint which performs the scraping and stores results in MongoDB. There’s even permalink support for when you find a particularly funny one!

This project used to be open source, but its subject matter doesn’t exactly scream professionalism and at some point I privated the repo. I do find it technically interesting though, so I want to give it a quick mention here. If you’re considering hiring me or something, let’s call it an exercise in API reverse engineering and web scraping (which it was).

There’s also the @NormalCommenter social media bot that used to post content from the site, superimposed on stock photos because it’s funny. That’s a Python app which is still open source, as it’s divorced from any salacious details. Its Twitter/Mastodon/Bluesky presence, however, is not. In September 2023 I was getting fed up with Twitter’s constant API changes and decided to turn the bot off entirely. At that point, it had made over 4000 posts across four and a half years, so it wasn’t exactly breaking new ground anyway.