Telegraph was developed by the Telegram team and introduced at the end of 2016. When creating, the developers were guided by the same principles as in working on the messenger: simplicity, convenience and anonymity are in the first place.
With the help of the Telegraph editor, you can design a neat, easy-to-read and read article. It does not require user registration in the usual way. The maximum that you may need is to link to the official bot if you want to track the statistics of views of your materials.
Why do you need a Telegraph if you can make regular posts in the channel? There are several big benefits:
- Wider possibilities for formatting. At the same time, various bots and other tricks are not needed;
- The text can be diluted with pictures, gifs and videos in any quantity;
- A Telegraph article is available to everyone on the network in the form of a page, not just Telegram users;
- The post size in the channel is limited to three thousand characters. There is no such limitation in Telegraph, you can cut longreads of any size.
The formatting here is straightforward, just the essentials:
- Bold and italic;
- Insert hyperlinks into text;
- Splitting into headings of the first and second levels (T1 and T2);
- Highlighting quotes.
Two types of quotes. To get the second option, you need to double-click on the corresponding icon (“).
- Add pictures, tweets and videos from Vimeo and YouTube with the ability to add captions.
Here are the main features of the Telegram article text editor that anyone who decides to use it sees. Let’s take a look at lesser-known things next.
- Telegraph bot
- In the Telegraph, you can add a post from a channel or group
- Can several people work under one account?
- View counter for articles
- Useful bot from TGStat
- Dividing lines
- Paragraphs and new lines
- They sailed. We put anchors
- Provide a link to your channel
- You can add GIFs to the Telegraph article
- You can make a nice short link
Telegraph bot
Telegram has a special bot that expands the editor’s functionality. It is called, suddenly, @Telegraph . In order to start using it, you need to log in.
To do this, launch the bot and click the “Log in as% username% on this device” button.
After logging in, you can edit your articles from any smartphone, tablet or computer. It will not matter where the article was created. Clicking the “My Posts” button will bring up a list of your posts.
At the same time, if you log in to the bot and then go to the Telegraph, a name will be automatically entered in the “Author” field, depending on what you specified in the settings.
What else can the Telegraph bot do:
- Specify or change the name of the account that is used for the bot;
- Specify or change the author’s name, which is displayed by default in the created articles;
- You can insert a link into the author’s name. For example, indicate the name of the channel and url to it. In the bot, you can specify all the necessary data for this;
- Log out on all devices or change account.
Multiple accounts come in handy if you run one, two, or more channels. Or, for example, you run your blog and channel on a topic. In this case, for each resource it will be possible to make publications under different accounts.
In the Telegraph, you can add a post from a channel or group
Like everything else, this is done in an elementary way:
- Copy the link to the post (you can do this from the desktop version of Telegram: right-click on the post and select the item “Copy link to the message” from the menu);
- We insert the link into the article!
Important : In this case, it is necessary that the channel is open, not private, and the chat has the status of a supergroup.
The post added to the article will display all the information that is also visible in the messenger: publication time, number of views, author’s name and “Edited” mark. At the same time, the number of views in a Telegraph article is taken into account in the total counter of views.
A similar “widget” is used for other materials that can be added to the article: tweets, pictures and videos.
There is a nuance with posts from channels and groups. You may have noticed that when you repost a vote, a post with likes / dislikes or link buttons, all these additional elements are not displayed. The same is in the Telegraph – only the main body of the message is transferred to the article . For example, the survey results will not be visible.
Can several people work under one account?
They can, but with minor restrictions. You won’t be able to work on an article at the same time, as in Google Docs. Instead, the bot provides you with a link, by clicking on which another user can work under your account. The validity period of such a link is short, so don’t hesitate.
This link can be used to edit saved articles.
View counter for articles
For reasons of minimalistic design, there is no built-in view counter on the post page. Instead, information can be obtained all through the same bot.
At the same time, the counter works not only for your articles. You can feed the bot a link to any Telegraph article. For example, we see that a detailed Telegram review, which Pavel Durov repost on his VKontakte page, scored 841,496 views at the time of this writing.
Useful bot from TGStat
@TGStat_Bot will give you more detailed statistics on post views and show in which channels a particular article was mentioned.
Dividing lines
If you type three “*” and press Enter, you get the following:
Paragraphs and new lines
As with most text editors, in Telegraph, you can hit paragraphs and just branch to a new line.
Simply hitting “Enter” is a paragraph.
“Shift” + “Enter” – move to a
new line.
They sailed. We put anchors
An anchor is a “bookmark” in the form of a link with additional characters. It serves to navigate within the material. For example, using an anchor, you can create tables of contents with the ability to jump to the desired chapter by clicking on the title in the list.
Making an anchor is easy. Create a link of the form:
http://telegra.ph/<article name> # <title name>
Example:
http://telegra.ph/telegraph-01-25#Separation Lines
If you post such a link in the channel, and then follow it from the messenger, then through Instant View the material will open exactly in that part of the text where the link leads.
There are several important points when working with anchors:
- If you are making a table of contents at the beginning of the article, then you should not make only one heading anchor. In this case, each heading must be a reference anchor;
- There is no limit on the number of characters in the title;
- Links are case and character sensitive;
- Part of the title cannot be anchored, only the whole;
- Spaces in a link are replaced with a “-” character.
Let’s say we have the heading “Example for this article # 1”, then the anchor link will look like this:
http://telegra.ph/article-name and#Example-for-this-article-#1
» Helpful Hint: At the end of a particularly long article, you can add a” Return to Top “hyperlink. It should lead to the first heading of the article or to the page itself.
Provide a link to your channel
This will be useful if the reader of your material is not subscribed to your own channel. When viewing an article through Instant View, the “Join” button will be visible at the top right, by clicking which the user can subscribe to the channel without entering it.
For such a button to appear, you need to insert a hyperlink into the text that is in the “Author” field. To do this, select the author’s name and specify the desired link.
You can add GIFs to the Telegraph article
They work exactly the same way as in regular Telegram posts!
You can make a nice short link
This is not difficult. Before saving your article for the first time, write a short title. After saving, Telegraph will create a link based on the title of the article. When the link is formed, you can write a more detailed title.
PS : It is not at all necessary to leave blank lines at the end of the text. For some unknown reason, this phenomenon is very common. The large white space at the end of the text is annoying and not very aesthetically pleasing. To avoid this, you just need to delete the remaining blank lines at the end of the material.
Enjoy using Telegraph!
