How I create this website with the help of AI

I don’t just write about generative AI in my Smart Content Report. I also use these tools myself. It’s a good way to find out what works and what doesn’t.

At the same time, this site would not be possible without the help of my AI assistants. After all, I don’t make any money from it. It’s actually a side project of another project of mine, namely UPLOAD Magazin (German only).

Having said that, I’m not an uncritical fan of the AI boom, just because these tools have proven to be useful. See the tag “criticism” on this page.

It is very important to me that I, as a human, keep my hands on the wheel at all times. I don’t automate. I utilize helpers.

Let me show you what that looks like.

Researching topics

The first thing I have to do is keep myself up to date. I use NetNewsWire as a feed reader. This allows me to keep track of new articles on relevant websites in one place.

Three sources are currently the most important for Smart Content Report:

• Hacker News. Run by VC investor YCombinator, it has developed an active community with a strong focus on technology, especially programming.
• Techmeme. This is a news aggregator specifically for technology topics.
• VentureBeat. There are many sites covering AI, but VentureBeat’s coverage is especially good and often in-depth.

Reddit is also important, but more for opinions and rumors, not so much for actual news.

Collecting, sorting, selecting

Interesting articles are saved with a shortcut on an Apple device of my choice and end up in the “News Desk Staging” area of my plugin (see below). In other words: I can easily batch my work. When I have the time, I go through my feeds and save items. At a different time, I can look at the “Staging” area and decide which topics are pushed to the next step. I can even do this on my iPhone.

You can see the “Staging” area on the bottom in the following screenshot showing the “Content Generation” page of my plugin:

With a click I can add one or more of the sources from “Staging” to the text field on the top. This is where I choose the AI model and the prompt. I have customized my prompt so that the AI immediately returns an English and a German version and also delivers everything exactly as the WordPress Editor needs it. Have a look at my prompt on this page.

A new addition to the plugin is a “Queue” for the article generation. Before, I could only send one article at a time to the AI. Now I can queue them up and they are generated while I’m away.

This is great, because when I then have time to actually edit and publish the articles, they are already waiting for me.

If I need or want to, I can of course still generate an article right away without sending it to the queue first.

Publishing

While I used tab groups in Safari in the past to keep everything organized, I don’t need this anymore with the latest version of my plugin. I just open the “Content Generation” page and look at the “Drafts” section: This is the list of already generated articles.

I open them all in new tabs and then it’s time to read, edit, improve, and correct the draft. There are a few things that need to be done before publication, such as the tags.

Every other Thursday I put together the Smart Content Report newsletter with the latest articles from the “Spotlight” category. For this, I use a newsletter plugin with the extremely creative name The Newsletter Plugin. It works well and can handle multilingual websites. You can subscribe to my newsletter here!

That’s my current process in a nutshell. If you have any questions or feedback, please get in touch with me: jan@smartcontentreport.com

This post from 19 September 2024 was last updated on 23 June 2026.