Automating Blog Metadata with Custom AI Skills
305 words.
The main obstacles for me to publishing lots and lots and lots of blog posts are:
- Creating a title
- Creating a summary of the post
- Choosing or creating an image for the post
- An endless loop of perfectionism that requires every word to be perfect before publication
I can’t do much about that last one, but the first ones are solvable.
Many, many of my posts have sat in drafts forever because I just didn’t feel like doing those things. I can type into an editor window all day, every day, and output voluminous amounts of sentences and paragraphs. But without metadata it’s useless for blogging.
Today I’m working on some AI helpers to do those things for me, or at least suggest things for me that I can tweak. I can’t stress enough how much I hate writing metadata for blog posts. The part of a blog post I care about is the text between the first word and the last word.
So I’ve created a Gemini skill (well, I told Gemini to create a Gemini skill) that will propose 3 titles, 3 summaries, and find an image based on keywords in the post. It also has the option to generate an image if no good matches are found. It also renames the post files properly and places the images in the right directories, ready to upload to my S3 bucket.
It took some back and forth to work out all the details. I saw Roger talking about trying out AI and he seemed frustrated that it required more effort than he expected. It does. You have to talk to it like you’re talking to a child.
For the record, I edited the AI-generated title and summary a bit.
Anyway, this post is mainly a testbed for the Gemini skill. I’ll probably do more.
This is a homegrown DIY comment system I'm working on. It technically works but it hasn't been through extensive testing yet. Good luck. Go here to enter a comment on this post without Javascript.