Building a Bot to post Mankutimmana Kagga verses to Mastodon
D.V. Gundappa’s Mankutimmana Kagga — 945 verses of timeless Kannada philosophy — deserves a wider audience. So I built a Mastodon bot to post one verse at a time, twice a day, complete with transliteration and English explanation. Here’s how it came together.
The Prompt
The project started with a simple ask to Claude: “Create a Mastodon bot to post Kannada Mankutimmana Kagga verses with a short explanation, configurable on how often to post.” From that single sentence, Claude scaffolded a complete Python project — kagga_bot.py, config.py, kagga_verses.py, and a scraper to pull all 945 verses from a public repository.
Features
- All 945 verses with Kannada text, Roman transliteration, and English explanation
- Configurable schedule — minutes, hours, or daily at a set time
- Sequential or random verse ordering, with persistent state across restarts
- Smart 500-char handling — tries full post, falls back to short tags, then posts as a thread if needed
- Theme filtering — post verses by theme (Wisdom, Death, Love, etc.)
- Dry-run mode for testing without posting
Challenges
The biggest debugging headaches were unexpected. The scraped kagga_verses.py contained literal newlines inside string literals — causing Python SyntaxError on load. Several verses needed surgical sed fixes. Mastodon’s 500 character limit required multiple iterations of the trimming logic, especially since Kannada Unicode characters count as multiple bytes. The Kannada hashtag #ಕಗ್ಗ rendered incorrectly on Mastodon — the virama joining character was silently stripped. And PythonAnywhere’s free tier proxy blocked outbound connections to ioc.exchange, requiring to move to ‘mastodon.social’ instead.
What I Learned
Encountering problems are a part of the process. Debugging them is part of the learning process.
The bot is live and posting. Check it out on Mastodon