How I Stopped Procrastinating on My Own Blog

Last month I caught myself doing the thing I always do: I had three half-finished drafts in Notion and zero posts live. Not because I had nothing to say — I just couldn’t be bothered to open a laptop, pick a title, and “be a blogger” for an hour.

So I did something a bit ridiculous: I made publishing as lazy as sending a voice note.

The actual message I sent first

I didn’t start with a manifesto. I literally typed this into WhatsApp (typos and all):

Topic: why I never finish blog posts
Keep it short, a bit self-deprecating, mention n8n and Vercel but don’t sound like a press release

About a minute later the post existed in my repo. That’s when I knew the setup wasn’t just a toy.

What happens under the hood (no buzzwords version)

1. WhatsApp fires a webhook when I message my “blog” number
2. n8n grabs the text, cleans it up, and builds a prompt
3. OpenAI returns Markdown + frontmatter (title, description, tags)
4. A GitHub node commits src/content/blog/some-slug.md
5. Vercel sees the push and rebuilds the static site

The slow part isn’t the AI — it’s usually me deciding what to send. The pipeline itself is routinely done in under a minute.

What actually breaks (so you’re not surprised)

• GitHub token scopes — fine-grained tokens love to expire the day you’re demoing.
• Model drift — a prompt that worked in March suddenly adds smart quotes in YAML and your build screams.
• Slug collisions — two posts titled “Notes on Postgres” in one week teach you to enforce unique filenames.

I keep a manual escape hatch: I can still drop a .md file in the repo like a normal person. Automation is optional; the site is not.

Rough costs, because people always ask

WhatsApp Business and hosting aside, the recurring bit is API usage. For short posts it’s cents per run. For “write me 3k words with citations” it adds up fast — so I keep prompts honest about length. The expensive part of my stack is still my time reading the output before it ships.

Why I didn’t use Medium

I’ve nothing against Medium, but I wanted:

• Markdown files I can grep, diff, and revert
• My own domain and analytics story
• No surprise paywalls in front of friends who click a link

If the automation ever breaks, I still own the content. That matters more than I expected.

What you’ll see here

Expect messy, useful stuff: automation, backend bits, things I broke in production, and the occasional rant. Some posts will be polished; some will read like I wrote them on the train — because I probably did.

I’m not trying to win a literary prize. I’m trying to finish thoughts in public. If a post feels half-baked, check the date — it might literally be v1 from a phone message I decided not to over-edit.

One thing I’d tell my past self

Ship the pipeline before you “just write manually until the tool is perfect.” Perfect never arrives; embarrassing v1 at least trains your prompts.

Curious about the person behind the keyboard? About has the longer version.