Tracery is a ‘templating language’ that lets you create a piece of text with tags in, such as “I am #number# years old and live in #city#” and replace the phrases between the hashtags with other words according to lists and rules you set up (so ‘#number#’ might become ‘20’ and ‘#city#’ might become ‘London’ or ‘Coventry’). Those rules can be simple or complex, and you can use this tool to make things like Twitterbots, games, or stories that change every time they’re read. This might sound confusing but the tutorials linked to on the Tracery website are short and show how quick it can be to start using!

Cheap Bots, Done Quick is a free tool which uses Tracery to help people make Twitterbots easily.

• Check out the tutorial on the Tracery website to get started
• Get the tool here.