Today I wanted to try creating this blog automation. It didn’t actually start out that way. It started with a simple problem: I have things I want to share, but creating a post, uploading it, and sharing it with the world takes more time and effort than I want to spend on it.
This isn’t my main job. I have tons of other things to do and many projects I’m working on simultaneously. I wanted a simple way to record what I’m doing each day, both as a challenge for myself to see my progress and so anyone who’s interested can follow along as I learn to create using AI.
What I Did
I decided to see if I could automate the process. With the help of AI, I created a workflow that should turn what I dictate in ChatGPT into a blog post automatically.
Initially, I thought the process would send my dictation through Make.com before pushing it to WordPress. But while brainstorming with AI, I found that I could eliminate that layer entirely and connect the process more directly.
This is the first time I’m testing it. If it works correctly, I can dictate what I want to share, have the blog post created for me, then review it and publish it if I’m happy with it—or make changes first if I want to amend anything.
Challenges
The main challenge was that there are so many ways to do this. I didn’t want to go too deep into complex automation workflows with tools like n8n or Make.com. That felt like too much for a very simple blog that I want to keep as low-maintenance as possible.
Another consideration was maintenance overhead. I could have built this as a React app, designed it nicely, connected it to my backend, and gone down that route. That was one of the possibilities I considered while brainstorming, but I didn’t want to create unnecessary maintenance for such a simple project and experiment. I already have tons of other things to do, so keeping this simple was important.
I also explored publishing this on Medium or Substack. One issue for me was ownership. If I publish on those platforms, I don’t really own the platform itself. With my own WordPress site—and, in the future, my own custom domain—it feels much more like it’s truly mine.
More fundamentally, Medium and Substack didn’t have the native connectors I needed to connect them directly with ChatGPT. That would have made the workflow more complicated, which went against the whole point of keeping this experiment simple. So in the end, I decided not to go that route.
What I Learned
One of my biggest learnings from this simple project is that sometimes it’s more difficult to simplify something than it is to add to it. Adding layers and connections can be easy because eventually you can make everything work. The harder part is knowing exactly what you want from a system and then ruthlessly simplifying it until it works beautifully with as few layers as possible.
That’s what happened here. I initially expected Make.com to sit between my dictation and WordPress, but after brainstorming with AI, I realized I could remove that layer entirely. There’s something beautiful about seeing a system work with minimal complexity.
It also has practical benefits. Every extra layer is another potential point of failure and another place where security issues can arise. Fewer layers mean fewer break points, less maintenance, and a simpler system to secure.
So the goal isn’t to build the most advanced automation. It’s to build the simplest system that does what I actually need and makes sharing my progress easy enough that I’ll keep doing it.
What Comes Next
Now I get to find out whether this workflow actually works. If this post appears as a draft ready for me to review, then that’s a pretty good start to Day 1.