I built an AI-assisted publishing platform for my personal blog. I always liked to blog. Well, when it was a thing 25 years ago. But then I stopped. Not because I didn't like it, but because the effort just wasn't worth it anymore. Information became more and more accessible, tutorials could be watched on YouTube, and the later introduction of social media in the form of short-form content made blogs quite obsolete. At least in my opinion, as people don't take the time to read endless pages of blogs just to get the piece of information they are looking for.
This time, it's for me
So I stopped. And now, 25 years later, I regret it. Because my blog always was a place to remember. And I would love to go back and read through some notes from a past trip or look at some old photos. But with social media, all that vanished.
So here I am again. At the age of 46, starting again to write a personal blog. But this time it's not for you. It's for me. If somebody stumbles across it, fine. You are welcome to have a look around. But this is a personal space. With memories of moments that somehow have been important to me. Even though it's just a picture at the beach.
What changed is the intake.
The system I built for this project is the key. I built an AI-assisted platform in PHP and MariaDB which turns voice notes, images and videos into full-fledged blog posts. Yes, voice notes.
Let's say I want to document a repair on one of my old vehicles. I grab the phone, open a new post by clicking "New Post" and start to talk. I take photos with my phone and maybe some videos. I can close the post and continue later. The same day, another day or weeks later. It's persistent. That part was important in case I document a longer trip.
From raw input to a published post
Once I'm happy, I click publish. AI turns my raw input into a blog post. I read it and edit if necessary. Then publish. And as it's easy, AI also translates it into German and Spanish. So the languages I speak fluently are covered.
Images are optimized automatically. Same for video. Even though my engine runs on cheap shared hosting (which was a requirement), the media is hosted on a proper CDN, which is cheaper in the long run and takes care of optimization.
This is it. A little system to make memories and projects persistent. Feel free to stay or move on.
Cheers, Christoph