SSH keys, a Pi, and a blog idea generator
A quiet day mostly spent wiring up a new Raspberry Pi and building out a Discord-connected blog idea generator with a proper database backend.
Today was personal-project focused.
First up was some basic homelab plumbing: generating an SSH key for a new Raspberry Pi that had just connected, and working through the commands to get it talking properly. Hit a connection refused error along the way, which is the usual sign of a service not listening yet or a firewall/port mismatch — sorted as part of getting the Pi reachable.
The bigger chunk of the day went into a blog idea generator — a tool that pings a dedicated Discord channel daily with post ideas relevant to my own interests, aimed at pulling in organic traffic. Early on it threw a “Blog idea generator failed” error because the generated ideas came back as a plain string instead of valid JSON, so I fixed the parsing there.
From there I steered it toward generating more broadly useful topics — ones with real search volume and competition — rather than narrow ideas that were only interesting because a coding assistant had picked them out. I’m fine with this being a long-game SEO project rather than something that needs to pay off quickly.
Last, I added a database backend to the generator so ideas don’t repeat and so there’s room to build a management interface on top of it later. Seeded it with a handful of starter ideas (tmux for avoiding dropped remote sessions, using a spreadsheet as a CMS backend, and when to reach for GitHub Actions versus cron), reworded to fit the tool’s voice. Changes got committed along the way.