About

EvoDevo Papers is a literature bot for evolutionary developmental biology. It keeps track of newly-published scientific articles in the field and shares them on various social media accounts with a slight hint of randomness, providing a great way to follow the latest publications or discover new works on EvoDevo. All the content is stored in this sleek website where one can explore our sources or the archive.

History

EvoDevo Papers was inspired by the pioneering literature bots known as @fly_papers (RIP) and @phy_papers. Based on this post and documentation, I built the initial version that used automation services like dlvrit, IFTTT, and Zapier to consume RSS feeds and publish the posts to Twitter. It operated on Twitter from 2015 to 2023, until the hostile takeover of the platform. Given the inevitable fate of the bird, I quickly setup a first version of the bot for the Fediverse, and posting to Mastodon began in 2022. After a year of recurrent issues with this setup, I decided to rebuild the bot from scratch to improve its robustness, flexibility, and functionality. The new version, based on the software stack below, has been running smoothly since 2024. During 2025 I released several major updates to the codebase and website and implemented posting to Bluesky.

Software

• Django (a Python web framework)
• django-feed-reader (a Django package for feed consumption)
• django-distill (a Django package for generating static websites)
• Mastodon.py (a Python library for the Mastodon API)
• ATProto (a Python library for the Bluesky API)
• Simple.css (a CSS framework for semantic HTML)
• Bootstrap Icons (a collection of open source SVG icons)
• FlexSearch (a JavaScript library for full-text search)