The Day I Finally Stopped Wasting 30 Minutes After Every Blog Post
Some automations are born out of excitement.
This one? Out of pure irritation due to monotonous work.
For months, I’d been stuck in the same ritual every time a blog went live.
And I didn’t even hate the work, I just hated how stupidly repetitive it felt.
- Hit publish.
- Open Search Console.
- Submit for indexing.
- Write a Reddit post.
- Think of a hook.
- Write that too.
- Find an image.
- Open Canva.
- Build a carousel.
- Export it.
- Upload it to Publer.
- Ping the team.
- All that effort… for one blog.
None of it was hard. None of it required genius.
It was just the kind of brain-chipping loop that makes you question why you’re still doing this manually in 2025.
So today, I sat down with one goal: end this cycle once and for all.
The Moment It Snapped
The trigger was silly. A designer wasn’t around, and my “social media team”; let’s be honest, was just me.
I sat staring at another empty carousel template and realised:
I’m not losing time because this work is hard.
I’m losing it because I’ve been the only idiot repeating the same dance over and over.
So I opened Pabbly.
First node: RSS trigger.
The moment a blog goes live, the system wakes up.
First fix: auto-submit to Search Console.
One less thing on my plate. One small sigh of relief.
Locking In My Voice (Because I Refuse to Sound Like an AI Intern)
Automation’s easy. Authenticity isn’t. So I added two documents to the workflow:
Humanising Content Doc
My Personal Tone Doc
These became my filters. Every Reddit post, caption, and carousel line that comes out of the system must pass through both.
No robotic filler. No “As an AI language model…” nonsense.
Just me: on a good writing day.
It took me 4 years to make these two documents in a way that AI understands it without fail. This was not done in one sitting. Rather its the summation of 10+ years of my writing + career journey.
Splitting Work: Machine vs Me
To keep things clean, I broke the process in two:
1. Fetch + Summarise Blog (via OpenAI Search API)
Tight pull from the live blog. No guesswork, no fluff.
2. Add Personal Layer
This is where I pour myself in — the frustration, the story, the subtext behind why that blog matters.
That became the foundation for my Reddit post: something that sounds like I actually sat down and wrote it, not something stitched together by a bot chasing engagement.
And that one layer changed everything.
The Secret to a Reddit Post That Actually Works
I figured out I needed just three things:
Clear “what not to do” rules
Fixed word count
Personal story triggers baked in
Tested it. Read it.
And for once, it didn’t make me cringe.
It sounded like me; unpolished, human, real.
Solving the Carousel Chore
Next up, the carousel grind.
I built two Canva templates:
Brand-Driven Carousel: founder-style, structured storytelling.
Social-Driven Carousel: aesthetic-first, clean, designed for Instagram flow.
Both set up for Bulk Create, so Pabbly could plug in text, images, and export everything without me lifting a finger.
Fixing the Slide Formatting Mess
Here’s where I got clever. I told OpenAI:
“Write the carousel in 5 lines. Separate them using *.”
Pabbly → Split Text → Done.
Five perfect slides. No resizing, no alignment struggle, no formatting drama.
The Hook Engine
For the first slide, I built a micro “hook machine”: it pulls from five frameworks:
Warning / Negative
Curiosity Gap
Direct Benefit
Listicle
Counter-Intuitive
Then outputs one hook. Short and insta-ready.
Making It Pretty: Pexels API
Next came visuals. I wired Pabbly with Pexels API to fetch a matching image for every carousel based on the hook.
No more scrolling through “abstract minimalist hd beige aesthetic” at midnight.
Later, I’ll swap this with Nano Banana for full brand control.
The Final Chain
Once all pieces are ready, the flow runs like this:
Canva Autofill → Publer → Trello → Email.
Canva fills and exports.
Publer queues the post.
Trello logs the task.
Email sends the summary.
All triggered by the RSS feed the moment a blog goes live.
A closed loop.
Zero manual effort.
What Today Actually Felt Like
I build things because I’m curious, generally. Today, I built because I was exhausted.
Exhausted by the endless “I’ll just do it quickly” moments. So I built my “minion assistant.”
A system that writes like me. Designs like a team.
Posts like a social media manager. Logs like ops.
All in sync. All automatic.
It’s not perfect yet. But it’s mine. And it saves me 20–30 minutes every single time.
That’s not just time saved. It's a mental load lifted.
And for a solo builder, that’s the kind of win that compounds quietly.