Most Bangladeshi people are on Facebook, and they spend a lot of time there. Even among my university friends, Facebook is the primary source for different kinds of news. They hardly know about great communities like Hacker News, for example — which means they often discover all the cool stuff late. And there’s a language barrier too.
So, I created Jontrokotha !
Jontrokotha?!
Jontrokotha means machine (jontro) stories (kotha). Or you might translate it cleverly to "Tech Tales". It's essentially a Facebook page where I plan to publish all the daily cool tech news, in my native language Bengali, for native readers.
To make this happen, I had to build a few tools. Here's what goes on under the hood:
- Hacker News has a free API — so, one script fetches the latest links.
- An LLM-based tool converts each link into a nice headline and summary.
- A tool uses Playwright to turn that information into a beautiful photocard.
- And finally, a tool publishes that post to the Jontrokotha Facebook page.
It's pretty simple, really. But somehow... even years after LLMs were introduced, it still feels magical.
The Coolest Part
I combined all these tools into a FastAPI server, hosted on a DigitalOcean droplet using my student account credits. Then I quickly hacked together a Svelte app that looks like this:
As you can imagine, I can just click "Publish", and the news — after getting summarized and translated — gets posted to my Facebook page!
Since launching yesterday, I already have over 100 followers! (Okay, most of them are my friends — but yay!)
And if you're wondering what kind of "photocard" gets published, here's a sample:
Note: In reality, the cards are in Bengali. Alongside the photocard, the summary is posted as the photo caption — with the full article link included.
Thanks for reading! This is my first blog post in my shiny new personal website.
Here are the links you might be interested in:
- fb-news-bot – GitHub repository of the four tools I mentioned
- jontrokotha-website – GitHub repository of the front-end
- Jontrokotha.live – Jontrokotha's website
- Facebook Page – Where the magic happens
