Telegram channel: Retro Games

As you might know, I love to get my hands dirty doing some coding and learning how to use new systems. Over the past week or two, I’ve taken a bit of a break from writing for the N64 Homebrew section and exploring the demo code for NuSystem to take on a little bit of a side-project. I’ve been learning about how to use APIs to integrate different applications together, specifically for a telegram channel that I’ve been working on.

The channel is the @retrogames channel. Ideally, I’d much rather have a N64 channel up and running, but I feel as though it’s too niche for the general public. You can find it here:

Add to telegram

It’s pretty much what you’d expect, you get pictures and little comments about retro gaming.

However, I created this channel a few months back but never got around to posting much because of the effort it took to go through and look for things, upload them and adding a comment so it stayed dormant for a while.

Now, here comes the API part.

At first, I thought of using a bot somebody made to just get a feed from RSS or Twitter and repost it to the telegram channel. However, this meant that there would be a lot of junk, even if I added a filter to it. Not wanting to annoy the hell out of the channel followers, I came up with another idea: a filter for interactions.

So these are the steps that the program follows:

1. Get items from feed (only twitter at this point) according to some search criteria.
2. Store in database only the ones with an image and at least one favourite.
3. Send to bot chat one of the tweets in the database (picture, filtered tweet message and channel send codes).
4. If the tweet is good, the user can press the send code to post the image (with or without message) to the channel.

I’m really proud of this code I wrote, but the problem is that it’s very specific to my personal use and not really transferable for use by other channel admins. This is something that I might look into moving forward.