Telegram Blog
Welcome to the official Telegram blog!
Telegram site can be automatically SSL
November 20, 2016
Simple as changing your DNS
Google is moving Chrome towards supporting SSL only.
And in general, secure browsing is a very good thing(tm).
As of today, Telegram supports SSL for every hosted site. Telegram will continue to work as normal if you point the DNS of your web site to
23.23.179.154orCNAMEtocname.telegr.am. Your site will continue to be served via HTTP.If you want to enable SSL for your site, point your site to
34.192.111.227orssl_cname.telegr.amand it will automatically have SSL.Telegram now uses Let's Encrypt to vend SSL certs for your site.
Happy First Birthday, Telegram
June 9, 2013
One Year since Telegram Launched
On June 9, 2012, I launched Telegram. Telegram is Markdown based content management system that allows users to store content in Dropbox or Git repositories.
In the last year, Telegram has served a limited community (mostly Lift-related folks) reasonably well. As a personal blogging platform, it's been great for me.
As a business… not so much… it's just something that's there and keeps ticking along.
So… happy birthday first birthday to a tool that I love using.
Scripts in Telegram
November 15, 2012
Telegram now supports Scripts
You can add scripts to your Telegram rendering so that you can programmatically add snippets, access external data, and do all kinds of other stuff as part of rendering your Telegram site.
Our first Script
Here's a pretty complex script I wrote as part of migrating a PHP site to Telegram:
November 12 Telegram Downtime
November 13, 2012
Telegram Downtime
Telegram, including all the sites hosted on Telegram, were down for about an hour from 17:45 GMT-8 to 18:45 GMT-8 November 12, 2012.
Here's a run-down of what happened.
How Telegram is structured
Currently, the process that converts a repository to a Telegram site runs as part of the main Telegram web application. This means that all the resources (memory and CPU) needed to render a site are shared with the process that serves the main https://telegr.am site (we are in the process of changing this).
The failure
Through the day on November 12, the Telegram web site (not other sites hosted by Telegram, just the main site at https://telegr.am), we intermittently unavailable.
@_telegram and @dexyit: The best way to publish your API documentation
October 12, 2012
Telegram and Dexy: The best way to publish your API documentation
Telegram is the best way to publish a web site. The content for Telegram sites can be hosted in GitHub, Git, and Dropbox. Thus, the management of the content and the versioning and access control and all the other stuff that most content management systems focus on is done by the best tools available today: Git for complex stuff and Dropbox for simple stuff. Telegram pushes the site by applying Hoisted to the contents of the repository resulting in a coherent, beautiful web site. Put another way, put Word, Markdown, HTML, Pages into Git/Dropbox and see the resulting site on Telegram or at your own domain.
Post to Telegram By EMail
August 18, 2012
Telegram supports posting to your blog via email
Now you can create blog entries in your Telegram blog just by sending an email containing the blog entry (and any JPEG images you want to include in your blog) to a magic email address. Not only does your blog get updated, but the backing store for your blog (Dropbox or GitHub) gets updated as well.
Post-by-email was one of the key features that initially drew me to Posterous. It was just so darned easy. I'm stoked that it's now part of Telegram.
Here's how to set up your account for post-by-email
Public Git Support and Cross Posting
August 6, 2012
Lots of new Telegram Features this week
Public Git Support
If you enable "Power User" mode:
You will see a button on your home screen to add a public Git repository.
We make the feature a power user feature because typing in the URL of a Git repo is non-trivial and it's likely that someone who can get the URL right is, well, a power users.
YAML support for Extra Info
Seems that Extra Info is taking on a life of its own. We've extended Extra Info parsing to support YAML, so you can have particularly complex Extra Info. For example:
Disqus and More
July 28, 2012
Lots of new stuff in Telegram this week
The big news, covered in another blog post Posterous Migration. But wait, there's more.
Internal improvements
We made improvements to the core Telegram code to facilitate better error reporting including log messages from rendering… this helps you diagnose issues during the render of your site.
There are also features that let you "hide" your site from the Telegram sites page. Plus, if there's no home page for your site, the site will not be displayed in the sites list (this is not retroactive… so older sites with rendering issues are in sites.)
Migrate From Posterous
July 25, 2012
Big Feature Alert: Migrate from Posterous to Telegram
You can now very simply migrate from Posterous to Telegram.
Telegram will slurp up all your public blog posts and all you media, copy it into the Telegram format (put headers, etc. where they are supposed to be, alias old URLs to new URLs, update media links, etc.). Then Telegram will copy these files to a new GitHub repository or to a Dropbox folder. Telegram will then publish a new site based on the contents of these folders. Voila… instant migration from Posterous to Telegram.
Plus, you get a complete copy of your Posterous content to do with what you want.
How much work is involved on your part?
Piles of Features
July 20, 2012
Telegram is maturing as a platform. There are a bunch of new features in the platform as well as improved documentation.
New and improved features:
RSS Feeds and More
July 6, 2012
Lots of new stuff in Telegram this week!
Telegram continues to mature and get new features.
RSS Atom files
Telegram automatically creates an
/rss.xmlRSS Atom file if there are blog posts. This can be disabled with theno_synthetic_rss_file: trueextra info. If the Atom file, a link<link type="application/rss+xml" rel="alternate" href="/rss.xml">is automatically inserted into each page.Right hand column
There's lots of stuff you can do to modify the flow of the page. The following code in
templates-hidden/include.htmlcreates 2 columns and puts a Twitter feed in the right hand column:
Lots of new Telegram Features
June 29, 2012
Telegram grew a ton of new features
I was on vacation in Europe for the last few weeks, but I still got some coding it.
Specifically, I moved the Hoisted templating stuff into the new Hoisted modules that render static HTML. This means that menu generation works and being able to grab an arbitrary set of pages (e.g., announcements or quotes) and list the pages and links to the pages. Lots of examples can be found in the Lift CMS repository. Note that the templates can be in any combination of XML, HTML, and Markdown.
Telegram also has extensive GitHub integration including:
How to blog
June 20, 2012
How to blog using Telegram
Telegram is a nifty way for you to blog based on files in your Dropbox or hosted on GitHub. This means you can blog from anywhere on any device. Simple.
If you put a file in the
_postsdirectory, the file will be considered a blog post.You can add extra info to the page to define information about the post:
[title: How to blog]: / [category: Tech]: / [date: 2012/06/20]: / [tags: {blog, tech}]: /Where:
GitHub Support
June 18, 2012
Telegram now supports GitHub
Yay!
Telegram supports GitHub as well as Dropbox as backing store for Telegram site.
After you sign up with Telegram, you will have the option to link your Telegram account with your GitHub account via a blue button on the bottom of the Telegram home page.
When you link your Telegram account with your GitHub account, Telegram will add a unique SSH public key to your GitHub account. Telegram uses this SSH key to read your GitHub repositories.
You can create a new Telegram site on GitHub by forking the my-blog sample site which contains a Home page, and About page, and a sample blog post.
Templates and Extra Info
June 11, 2012
Telegram Blog
Telegram "extra info" and Templates, June 11, 2012
Each Telegram page may contain extra info. Extra info is information about either the page or the whole Telegram site, but it is not displayed on the page.
You can define extra info by placing colon-separated values at the top of the page. For example:
title: My Fun Page date: 2012/08/14 # This is my page Blah blah blahYou can separate the extra info with an optional line of dashes:
---------- title: My Fun Page date: 2012/08/14 ---------- # This is my page blah blah blahYou can also include the extra info as Markdown references. This format makes the page look prettier in Markdown preview mode: