When an Apple keynote event is underway, we can’t help but load up the live blog feeds and discuss the spectacle in our internal Campfire chat room as it unfolds. It’s a lot of fun but it usually involves a lot of reloading and copying and pasting too. So when I found out Tuesday morning that Ars Technica would be covering the Macworld keynote live on IRC, I had an idea: why not write a script to do all the hard work for us?

Ten minutes later the Campfire relay bot was born. I hooked up a Ruby IRC library with Marshmallow (an unofficial Campfire library that we use to display Subversion commits) to create a bot that repeats everything from Ars’ #mwsf channel to a room in our Campfire account. If you’re interested you can read the resulting transcript and download the bot (see the campfire_relay_bot.rb file for configuration instructions).