Now that I have the ability to train a neural network and an Ubuntu laptop with Python installed, I’m ready to go on to the next phase of my project: automatically creating a meme and posting it to Instagram.
Of course I’m going to start off by checking out what others have done for ideas. I found an Instagram meme bot called Instameme, and a meme generator called Meme Generator Python that I am sure will be fairly useful for a starting point. I also stumbled upon this Doge meme generator that is just awesome.
After looking through my options, I decided to start by trying to get meme-generator-python installed and functioning. First I downloaded and installed the impact font file, and then I created a virtual environment to install into. This script requires Python2 to be used, so I consulted my handy virtual environment commands cheat sheet I made last time.
cd .virtualenvs
virtualenv -p $(which python2) memebot_env
workon memebot_env
pip install wandAfter my virtual environment was made, I downloaded and extracted the meme-generator-python files into my “memebot_env” folder.
I put a sample David Rose photo in the folder and then tried to run the script, but received an error saying wand wasn’t installed.
I ran the wand pip installation command and then retried the memgen.py and this time it worked!
Behold, my very first automatically created meme!
Now that I’m able to automatically generate a basic meme, I’m going to move on to figuring out how to upload the photo to Instagram. I’ll go into more detail in my next post, until then enjoy a video of Smooshy’s first outdoor adventure!