What route should i follow if i wanna create a blog that auto-designs social posts and then auto publishes them on socials whenever a new article is added?

dontblink@feddit.it to Programming@beehaw.org – 2 points –

I work for an association and every time i get the material for a new blog post i need to format, publish it on the blog and then design different types of post for FB, IG and Telegram with their own formatting. That requires plenty of time and work.

Ideally, i would love to create a blog where i can publish items ONE TIME, and then get social designs (with one or two alternative types of designs) and getting the text formatted right to be published.

The website is on wordpress right now, but i'm studying webdevelopment and i would really love to remake it in plain code with HTML, CSS and JS / JS frameworks. I'm not seeking to do this on Wordpress, on the opposite i would like to move away from it.

I know i would have to work with the APIs of the socials in order to get the content automatically published and with AI to get a quick text formatting: for example cutting some key parts of a text automatically. I have no clue for the design part, right now i'm using Canva but i always do pretty simple designs and all by hand.

I know this is probably a pretty ambitious project but it would leave me with A LOT less work once all of this is correctly set up, and replicating this for other blogs would simply be awesome.

How much is this makable? Would it require a lot of paid services, are the APIs usually free for such a small use? Where should i start from to learn how implementing the auto design part? Can a Junior webdeveloper do something like this in a reasonable amount of time, or are these pretty advanced skills?

5

Admittedly, I have not used AI, but that probably would be overwhelming compared to everything else you have listed so far. (In other words, the time spent learning it would overshadow the amount of gain you would have from it)

But I believe everything else you've mentioned is probably achievable, even if it's not all at once. I do not use those social media sites, so I don't have an immediate answer, but I can assist in thinking about the problem. (Programming is all about solving problems you don't know how to solve yet) It's also iterative, you don't have to have a complete solution to make your life a lot easier.

Let me ask some questions that may help:

  • What are the most common kinds of formatting that you do?
  • What are the various syntax tools that these social media sites use?
    • I honestly could not find an easy answer to this, which surprised me.
  • Is there a formatting syntax that can already be converted to other kinds of syntax that you want to do?
    • My go to for that is Markdown, which is usually promising, but I do not know your needs.

It's always good to break your problem down into smaller problems first, and then solve each small problem, one at a time.

Let me know if that helps, and feel free to provide more details.

edit: grammar

If you're looking to "glue" a bunch of APIs together, a service like IFTTT may be something you want to look into.

I second this but would recommend n8n instead, since you can self-host it and you're not dependent on another online service.

APIs are generally not free, but they are pretty easy to use rest calls and very low cost for small volumes - I've paid up to$40/month for my bot but once it slowed down to ordinary levels of usage it's probably under $10/mo.

It's not clear to me whether you want to use AI to summarize or reword content based on individual audience and platform technical needs, or if you want to AI to design and format it for you and apply all the correct markup or formatting markers. I wouldn't do that with AI unless it's very simple because the AI won't be consistent with non-specific tasks.

If I were looking to do this, I'd create a sort of design template to drop text into, then I'd have the AI pull out and reword the text for each section - possibly this could be a single prompt or multiple depending on the template complexity. You'd probably want different prompts for each social due to different technical requirements and possibly different audiences.

I'd also put in a lot of work with the prompts to make sure you get it fairly good at outputting what you want without any back and forth to make adjustments. Only when I had templates and prompts I was really happy with would I try automating it, and even then I'd never pipe the output directly to social media without human review because even the best prompts will have bad output from time to time.

That all being said, I'm not sure what your workflow is and I might be overcomplicating it.