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
What Broke
Literal newlines in the verse data. The scraper pulled all 945 verses from a public repository and generated kagga_verses.py automatically. What it didn’t handle was multi-line verse text — the strings had literal newline characters embedded inside them, which Python reads as a syntax error. The file wouldn’t even load. Fix: a sed pass to replace literal newlines inside strings with \n escape sequences before import.
The 500-character limit is stricter than it looks. Mastodon’s limit is 500 characters, but Kannada Unicode characters consume multiple bytes each. A verse that looks short can blow past the limit. The first trimming logic counted characters naively. The fix required counting bytes, not characters, and building a cascade: try the full post → fall back to a shortened version with just the Kannada text and a note → post as a thread if it still won’t fit.
The Kannada hashtag silently broke. #ಕಗ್ಗ uses a virama (the joining character that combines consonants in Kannada script). Mastodon’s hashtag parser stripped it, turning the hashtag into something unrecognisable. The workaround was switching to a transliterated hashtag #Kagga alongside the Kannada version — less authentic, but actually clickable.
PythonAnywhere’s free tier blocked the Mastodon instance. The original plan was to host the bot on PythonAnywhere and post to ioc.exchange (the infosec Mastodon instance). PythonAnywhere’s free tier uses a proxy that blocks outbound connections to many smaller Mastodon instances. The fix was switching to mastodon.social, which is large enough to be on PythonAnywhere’s allowlist.
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