When Timm, Laura, Elber and I first ran the @everytreenyc Twitter bot almost a year ago, we knew that it wasn?t actually sampling from a list that included every street tree in New York City. The Parks Department?s 2015 Tree Census was a huge undertaking, and was not complete by the time they organized the Trees Count! Data Jam last June. There were large chunks of the city missing, particularly in Southern and Eastern Queens.
The bot software itself was not a bad job for a day?s work, but it was still a hasty patch job on top of Neil Freeman?s original Everylotbot code. I hadn?t updated the readme file to reflect the changed we had made. It was running on a server in the NYU Computer Science Department, which is currently my most precarious affiliation.
On April 28 I received an email from the Parks Department saying that the census was complete, and the final version had been uploaded to the NYC Open Data Portal. It seemed like a good opportunity to upgrade.
Over the past two weeks I?ve downloaded the final tree database, installed everything on Pythonanywhere, streamlined the code, added a function to deal with Pythonanywhere?s limited scheduler, and updated the readme file. People who follow the bot might have noticed a few extra tweets over the past couple of days as I did final testing, but I?ve removed the cron job at NYU, and @everytreenyc is now up and running in its new home, with the full database, a week ahead of its first birthday. Enjoy the d?rive!