This may be a very niche post as it’s entirely about something I built for me, for this blog, and the way I want it to work.

That said, it’s also a bit about the fallibility of AI and the human(s) who operate them.

Posting a Note

Since restarting the Notes/miniblog part of this site, I often found myself bogged down having to log in to my WordPress dashboard, and make sure I selected various options before posting. Surely there must be a nicer, simpler, easier way to do this. My requirements were pretty straightforward:

Req 1. I want to have a quick way to post to the Notes category of this blog.

Req 2. I don’t want any post in the Notes category to be emailed out to the subscribers of the blog (subscribers should still get emails about every other post category).

Simple enough, right?

Off I went to search for a WordPress plugin that would fulfil my needs, after all they couldn’t be that unique, could they? Yet after a fruitless hour or so I soon started to realise that there wasn’t anything out there that quite matched what I needed, and certainly not in a nice clean way.

So I turned to ChatGPT and asked it to help:

”Is it possible to build something that will let me post to my blog, but which limits the category, and turns off the Jetpack subscriber email for that post?”

In my mind, I was thinking it would require some PHP and the building of a plugin, so let’s get AI to do the grunt work, that’s what it’s good at.

Dutifully ChatGPT headed straight there, generating blocks of code and instructions that helped me build a simple plugin that let me post straight to the Notes category from the sidebar of WordPress. It worked, but the whole having to go to the WordPress dashboard, despite the clean implementation of the plugin just irked. So I, like all good users, decided to add a new requirement.

Req 3. I don’t want to have to login to the WordPress dashboard to do this.

And off we went down the path to build a custom front end that would allow me to post from there, just by visiting a URL — essentially a hidden page on my blog that I could bookmark — and with very little effort on my part, I got it up and running in about 10 mins. It worked well but I couldn’t help but feel that was a little insecure, having a posted page that let whoever found it post direct to my blog. So I tried another tack.

Editor’s Note: The page mentioned above has since been deleted.

Casting my mind back a few weeks I remember starting to build an Apple Shortcut to help post to my blog (essentially tackling this very problem) so I asked ChatGPT:

“Can I build this as an iPhone only workflow (note: I did not use the word Shortcuts)”

And off we went into the fun that is Apple Shortcuts with a slightly shonky companion in ChatGPT that doesn’t quite seem to know what functions are available or how they work — for example it frequently asked me to get a variable that wasn’t already set somewhere.

With a bit of back and forth though, largely driven by my lack of knowledge around Shortcuts, I managed to build the shortcut and for the most part it worked, the text was captured and a post was created in the Notes category, all from a little popup screen on my phone.

A little tweaking to get a Title from the first line of the text, and the rest being posted as Content was needed but, it was pretty straightforward and more importantly, it worked.

Excellent!

Except…

Bad Jetpack

In my excitement to get the posting flow working, I’d completely forgotten about my second requirement.

Req 2. I don’t want any post in the Notes category to be emailed out to the subscribers of the blog (subscribers should still get emails about every other post category

Back to ChatGPT I went and, as the few subscribers to this blog will note, it didn’t go so well (apologies once again for all the testing emails!).

Whilst the posting part was working fine, no matter what I tried, I could not get Jetpack (the WordPress piece that handles emailing new posts out to subscribers) to ignore any posts from the Notes category.

My first attempt, with no AI help, was to check Jetpack settings and yes, it does have a way to list the categories a subscriber will receive, but it doesn’t seem to (always) honour them.

FAIL.

My second attempt, with the aid of ChatGPT, was to try passing Jetpack API instructions as part of the JSON posting method from the Shortcut. Nope, no dice with this method either.

FAIL.

I reported the API fail back to ChatGPT and it’s response was:

And lastly, we — huh that’s interesting ‘we’, given the chat like nature of the AI, it’s so easy to fall into the idea that it’s a being, not just lines of code — tried sending a meta field to Jetpack but, once again, even though the parameters were correct (confirmed by ChatGPT but I wonder, did it REALLY know they were correct?) it still didn’t give the desired output.

FAIL.

I was getting frustrated at this point, and I think I sensed that from ChatGPT too..

At this point, ChatGPT directed me back to PHP, back to WordPress, and with a few lines — provided by ChatGPT — I had a working solution for requirement 3. No emails being sent out when I post to the Notes category.

Success!

I finally had the solution I wanted. It took me a few hours of back and forth, but overall I think it was a worthwhile test. Maybe I could’ve gotten there quicker on my own (the coding isn’t particularly complex and I’ve since found examples of the PHP that could’ve worked for me) but I wasn’t just doing it for the solution, I was doing it to give myself a concentrate example of building something (not an app just a simple workflow) using AI.

And, perhaps more importantly, as well as succeeding there were plenty of lessons to learn from my usage of AI on this silly little project; writing good clear prompts are key, and my tendency to just ask short sharp questions lead me down the wrong pathways a few times. If I’d been clearer upfront I think I’d have gotten this done in one go and in an hour or so.

The AI fail

The language ChatGPT used when I finally gave up trying to get the shortcut to stop sending out emails with each post, made me wonder why it hadn’t, you know, told me that in the first place?:

Admittedly, I went into this little experiment completely blind and for the most part, I wasn’t trying to LEARN how to get this to work, I was just trying to blindly build a solution to my problem. As long as it works, who cares what goes on under the hood. If it breaks, ChatGPT will help me fix it, right?

Somewhere ChatGPT had the knowledge to suggest that “this fix is how most people actually solve it”, so it was more than a little annoying that it didn’t head to that option first. Was it because I moved away from the PHP/plugin pathway? Even then, it wasn’t smart enough to put the final solution (PHP) together with the purely Shortcut driven solution as we were trying different options to get each to work. It feels like it could’ve figured that out without pushing me through all the OTHER Jetpack options first?

Yet, for all the moments of frustrations — and a couple of hours lost to a fruitless attempt to get something to work that ChatGPT then admitted usually fails — I will say that, for the most part, the AI was helpful when it could be.

Building the shortcut wasn’t a smooth process, due to ChatGPT making presumptive leaps here and there, but a couple of times I ended up taking a screenshot to show it and it pointed out exactly where we had gone wrong — ohh there’s that ‘we’ thing again.

A fallible process, and definitely fallible actors at play (both of us), but we got there in the end.

Would this have worked better with Claude? Would it have been more successful if I had given clearer parameters at the start? What does this all mean for AI usage for everyday non-geeks? I have enough tech knowledge of scripting to be able to see when something was wrong (like asking for a variable that hadn’t been set), but I can’t see someone with no tech background building a simple workflow like this using AI alone, you do need enough knowledge to at least ask sensible questions, and spot when something is obviously wrong.

“ChatGPT can mistakes” it says at the foot of chat page and therein lies the rub. It’s not perfect, it doesn’t know everything, even things it should be able to reference online, and you need to guide it very precisely.

I see lots of devs having success with Claude to build mini-apps but I have to assume that that is more down to their guidance and knowledge, than the AI being particular smart (yet). I’m not a software developer, I work with them and have picked up snippets of knowledge here and there, but I didn’t approach AI with a logic flow of “I think we need to set some variables, then create a prompt, then take that prompt and assign line 1 to variable A, and line 2 to variable B, and then combine those into a JSON …” and if I get the time, maybe I’ll recreate this project from that way to thinking (probably not though).

It’s also interesting how much emotion I projected into the chats with ChatGPT. One prompt from me had ChatGPT chuckling away in sympathy at my frustration (it was late, I was tired):

I guess the bottom line is that I got what I wanted. I have a Shortcut that runs on my phone, and with one click I can publish a post in the Notes category that won’t send out an email notification to the (few) subscribers to my blog.

The Shortcut

For those that are super interested, here’s how to build something like this yourself. You’ll need to change things like the category ID but hopefully it makes enough sense.

Oh and you’ll need a Base64 Application Password too for the Authorisation parameter.

Then you need to build that into the Shortcut (Get Contents of URL):

And here’s how it all looks when it’s put together.

Jetpack PHP

And to turn off Jetpack subscriber emails for a specific category? Add a code snippet to your functions.php (or use a code snippet plugin):

add_filter( 'jetpack_subscriptions_exclude_these_categories', function( $categories ) {
    $categories[] = 'notes'; // your category slug
    return $categories;
});