A Journalist – led text online broadcast via Telegram

Text translation is more and more part of our lives. Thanks to modern technology, they are becoming a more attractive way to convey information in real time to a large audience. Even here, on habré, have been carried out text broadcasts of different events. Implement such broadcast all in different ways. Someone uses the internal functionality of a website, others use ready-made services, and others – is edit plain text posts, forcing their users to constantly refresh the page or doing it for them, the simplest scripts.

I have long been haunted by the idea that such a broadcast is very similar to how we share our experiences in messenger with friends and acquaintances. And it is really convenient. We just tell them my story. Thus was born the idea to create a service for text translations, the main and only interface which is a Telegram bot. Meet – Journalist.

All you need to do in order to create a stream – add as contact bot, press the appropriate button his keyboard and enter the name of the broadcast. Only a few seconds and you're live. Today it is the fastest method among similar services, and given the dynamic nature of events monitored such broadcasts is a major competitive advantage.

After creating a translation bot will give out the links page on public broadcast and on the preview page and the html code to insert broadcast on the website and the team for inviting other editors to conduct the broadcast.

Interaction with the bot is constructed in such a way that it was a really convenient way of doing broadcast. Of course, it will be more comfortable to do sitting at a computer with fast Internet and slowly sipping your favourite hot drink. But at the same time, to complete the work sufficient phone or tablet and, thanks to the undemanding Telegram'a to the quality of the connection, at least some of the Internet. This gives you the opportunity to work in the field and stay productive, delighting your readers with interesting material from the scene.

In this regard, I am proud to call JournalistBot one of the first Telegram bots designed to create professional content.

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Facilities

The service already provides all necessary functions for doing text translations. In the text messages supported Markdown markup, respectively, the posts can be nice to format. Photos can be sent directly to the chat as an image or as a link. In both cases, it will be correctly inserted into the stream. Also supports links to embedded resources: YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Instagram, etc. From the editor no need to go to the site of the target service and get the embed code, the bot takes this task on himself. In addition, the editor has the ability to send chat voice message, video, and location, or even a sticker. All this will be instantly delivered to readers of the translation.

The posts are collected from message and are not visible to readers until you click "Publish". However, the editors can see a compiled post on the preview page. If the typo still remained unnoticed until the publication, or published is not what you wanted – it does not matter, you can correct the message by editing its standard tools, or remove it from the broadcast by sending a Delete command as a response (Reply) to this message. Changes will automatically appear in all the readers of broadcast.

For team work it is possible to connect multiple editors to a single broadcast. To do this, after you create a broadcast, the bot, together with other information, sends the command /join <token>. Sending this command to the bot, another editor will join the jurisdiction of the broadcast. Messages from each editor form separate posts therefore, working in parallel, they will not interfere with each other. For such broadcasts, it is possible to display the author of each post, which can be enabled in the settings.
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Target audience

As the target audience in the first place are considered the media sites and bloggers. In this case, usage scenarios are obvious, and the benefits from the use of this service is that you don't have to worry about the technical part of the broadcast and you can be sure that hundreds and thousands of users will receive the updates as quickly as possible. Looks like a real stream, built-in blog, you can see here.

However, nothing prevents ordinary users who are not involved on a regular basis by holding such events, to take and to try, because transmission is a public page (example), a link to which is sufficient to distribute among their readers. So, if you take a completely opposite media example, it is possible to go on vacation, create a stream and send the link to your friends to keep them up to date with their adventures.

The bot is capable of several translations and switch between them via menu.

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Under the hood

The service is fully implemented on node.js and designed to be easy to scale out. This allows you to impose to it model: there is an audience for → money → add server. As shown, this approach is very useful due to the fact that there is no need to start on expensive equipment and not to wait for his highload, in this case, when the load increases to be able to quickly respond without having to "rewrite from scratch". The whole system is deployed in Docker containers, which are automatically collected in the Networks CI, this greatly simplifies deployment of the system and makes it updating and expanding even more trivial process. File storage is also implemented in such a way that at any time you can easily migrate to services like Amazon S3 and embed CDN. Clients receive updates via Websocket.

Greater emphasis is placed on performance. When loading the page, the user does not notice the individual loading of the translation, the page looks monolithic. While this may not work in 100% of cases, but after expansion of the network of servers and geo-distribution of requests, all should be even much better. However, now the delay is minimal. This in turn affects SEO. Broadcast inserted to the website will be indexed by all the modern search engines, because it produced only a minimum number of manipulations with the DOM and search engines are ready to wait for when indexing the page.

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Known issues

Because the keyboard Telegram bots appeared relatively not so long ago, yet not all of them smoothly. For example, there is a problem on Android client – when replying to a message (Reply) keyboard bot disappears and there is no way to call. This makes it difficult to change the post type and deleting it. While as a workaround, you can send this command button in chat, and then copy it into the reply message. I hope that soon this will be fixed by the developers of the client. IOS and Mac OS this is no problem.

At the moment there is no possibility to use the bot in a group chat, which would be very convenient to work in a team. The matter is again in keyboard bot. In a group chat keystrokes sends the message always as a response to the message the bot and there is no way to send it just to the chat like new. This makes problematic the implementation of the same functionality that is available in private chat, so waiting for Telegram appears in the opportunity or is in a head will not come good idea, as this limitation nicely around.

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Future

Now I want to get feedback from potential users of the service, to understand how he is popular, what features they would like to see in it. Of course, while I have my own plan for the development of functionality, which I gradually implemented in parallel with the modification for reviews first users. For example, one of the next major updates should be receiving statistics on readers of the translation in the interface of the bot.
A week ago, to my surprise, the project was savecert ProductHunt, got to the main page and has collected a good number of votes, although if it had been prepared to run, it would be possible to achieve a much better result. On the one hand, such a spontaneous run a little disrupted my plans, but on the other it means that the project is still in demand.

Looking forward to your feedback and your translations. Happy to answer questions in the comments, you can also write on mail mail@journali.st. Thank you for your attention.

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru