Telegram is one of the most popular messaging apps and probably the most loved by developers. The reasons are many, but I think that it mostly boils down to their openness, which led many programmers to create unique and interesting projects around it. Today I want to share one of those: TLGUR.
TLGUR is a very simple Telegram bot, originally designed to share files and images with people who don’t use Telegram. In a nutshell, after sending a file to the bot you receive a URL, that you can then share with everyone.
This is already amazing, but for a developer, things can get even more interesting. Turns out that the given link can be served as a static asset in a browser, such as a web page.
Let’s build a quick working example:
Create a "test.html" file with the following content:
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<h1>TLGUR is amazing</h1>
</body>
</html>
And send it to the bot:
The result link can be visited with any web browser, and works as expected:
Conclusion
This opens a world of possibilities for quick experiments and, combined with the rest of Telegram APIs, could theoretically make it possible to host a full-blown website, possibly even a dynamic one. That said, this is not suited for production use and should not be abused.
