Things

I've always wanted one of these pages. You know the type — "things I find interesting", "reading list" yada yada. Basically a dumping ground for interesting stuff I come across on the day-to-day.

So, I made a telegram bot that does it for me.

TL;DR

Things

things

The setup

Two repos:

things-bot — a ~170 line Python script running on Railway. It's a Telegram bot.

You send it a URL, it fetches the page title (or the YouTube video title via oEmbed), optionally generates a one-liner summary via the Claude API, formats a markdown entry, and commits it to the second repo.👇

things — just a markdown file. Turns into costafot.github.io/things via Github Pages.

The bot writes to this repo. Railway watches the other one. Keeping them separate means a new link doesn't trigger a redeploy. (debatable whether that matters 🤣)

The workflow: see something interesting → message Telegram bot → ✅. It goes to the markdown file within a few seconds.

The stack

• python-telegram-bot for the bot plumbing
• httpx for async HTTP (fetching titles, hitting the GitHub API)
• GitHub Contents API for reading and writing the markdown file directly — no git CLI, no cloning, just REST calls
• Railway for hosting — free tier, deploy from GitHub, add env vars, forget about it
• Jekyll + GitHub Pages for rendering.

Hope you found this somewhat useful.

@markasduplicate