Daily Briefing Automation
I built a system that wakes up before I do, reads the news, checks the weather, and publishes two WordPress posts every morning at 8 AM. No coffee required.
The Problem
Best Media Publishing needed daily content. News, weather, Texas updates. Doing it manually meant I would miss days, or worse — publish boring placeholder text.
Solution? Automation. A cron job that runs on my Mac mini, fetches fresh data, and pushes posts to WordPress.
What It Does
- Weather: Pulls Universal City, TX current conditions and forecast (switched from wttr.in to Open-Meteo after timeouts)
- National News: Grabs NPR headlines every morning
- Texas News: Searches for Texas-specific stories
- Images: Generates AI headers with DALL-E 3
- Email: Sends me a summary link every morning via Gmail
The Stack
- macOS cron job for scheduling
- bash script for the heavy lifting
- WordPress REST API for publishing
- gog CLI for Gmail notifications
- DALL-E 3 for images
The Lesson
Your infrastructure does not have to be fancy. It has to work reliably. A 5-year-old Mac mini running a 50-line bash script beats a ‘scalable cloud architecture’ that has not shipped.
Build once, run forever.