Bloggram turns your Telegram channel into a blog

A lot of good writing lives on Telegram. People run channels about cooking, local news, programming, books, their neighborhood, their dog. They post every day, people read every day, and almost none of it can be found outside the app. Search for a recipe you know is sitting in some channel and you probably won't find it. Telegram has a public preview at t.me/s/, but it has no readable addresses, no titles, no tags and no sitemap, so search engines don't do much with it.

Bloggram fixes that. It takes a Telegram channel and turns it into a blog that search engines can read, and it keeps that blog in sync with the channel on its own. You keep writing where you already write.

Three steps, and the third one is automatic #

First, you sign in with Telegram. There's no password to create: you send a message to the bot, @bloggygram_bot, and it gives you a button that opens your dashboard.

Then you add that bot to your channel as an administrator, with two permissions switched on: post messages and edit messages. It has to be a channel. Groups don't work.

That's it. The moment the bot becomes an admin, the blog exists. Its address comes from the channel's name, so a channel called "Café Notes" becomes cafe-notes.bloggram.lol. If the channel is public, its older posts come along too, so the blog doesn't start empty. A private channel starts from its next post.

What a post becomes #

Every post gets its own page, with an address like /p/123-your-title. The first line of the post becomes its title, so short first lines make good titles. The start of the text becomes the description that shows up under the link in search results and in previews when someone shares it.

The formatting you use in Telegram comes along: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, code, quotes and links. Even spoilers work, staying hidden until the reader hovers over them.

Hashtags turn into tag pages. Write #travel in a few posts and /tag/travel lists all of them, newest first.

Photos are copied to Bloggram and stored in up to three sizes, so a phone downloads a small file and a big screen gets a sharp one. Albums become a single post with every photo in the order you sent them, and the first photo is the image people see when the link is shared. Video, audio and files stay on Telegram. The post still goes up, with a short note saying there's media to see in the channel.

When you change your mind #

Edit a post in Telegram and the page changes within seconds.

Deleting is the funny part. Telegram never tells a bot when a channel post is deleted, so Bloggram has to go and check. It looks at recent posts every few minutes and at older ones less often, and when a post is gone from the channel, its page and its photos come off the blog. For private channels it checks with an empty edit, which is why the bot needs the edit permission.

If you want a post to stay in the channel but not on the blog, you can hide it from the dashboard. The dashboard also lets you change the blog's title, description, language and address, import the history again or delete the blog.

Built to be found #

The whole point is search, so every blog gets the boring, important things done right: a proper title and description on every page, canonical addresses, link previews for social networks, structured data that marks each post as a blog post with its date and language, a sitemap, a robots.txt that points to it, and an RSS feed at /rss.xml with the last 50 posts in full.

There's also a rule against spam. Anyone can open a Telegram channel in a minute, and a free blog service is a gift to spammers. So a new blog stays out of search engines until it looks like a real one: at least 5 posts, 10 subscribers in the channel and 3 days of life. Until then, people can read it and follow its feed normally, and only search engines are asked to wait. Bloggram reviews new blogs once a day, and the dashboard shows what's still missing. Links to other sites are marked nofollow, so nobody gets anything out of spamming them.

Small on purpose #

Bloggram is one program and one database file. There's no separate database server, no queue service and no cache server. Pages are kept in memory and usually come out in a couple of milliseconds, and the blogs themselves run without a single line of JavaScript. The whole thing runs on a single server.

For you, that means pages that load fast, even on a bad phone connection. It's free, with no ads and no trackers, and the only account you need is the Telegram one you already have.

There are a few limits, mostly to keep things healthy: three blogs per account, photos up to 20 MB and a cap on how many new blogs can open each day. Your own domain isn't there yet, but it's planned. And if you ever want out, you can delete a blog from the dashboard, or delete your whole account by sending /deleteaccount to the bot.

Try it #

Bloggram is brand new, still at version 0.01, and it's the kind of thing that gets better with real channels using it. If you run a Telegram channel, or know someone who does, start a blog and see your posts become pages. The documentation explains every detail, from how titles are chosen to what happens to your photos.

And if something breaks or feels wrong, write to me at pablomurad@pm.me.