I run a small bilingual tech blog on WordPress. For the longest time, every single post cost me the same annoying 15 minutes: write in a doc, fix the formatting, log into wp-admin, paste, clean up the mess, preview, publish. Do it again in English if I wanted the post in two languages.
The writing was never the problem. The moving was the problem.
I tried a couple of AI writing subscriptions along the way. They were fine for generating text, but then I still had to babysit the output into WordPress — so I was paying monthly for a step that didn't actually remove a step.
So I built (and eventually packaged) a small desktop tool that does the whole chain. This post is mostly a walkthrough of how that workflow works now, in case you're in the same loop.
The pipeline, end to end
topic → AI writes → I preview/edit → optional translation → publish to WordPress
Five steps, but only one of them is me.
A few details that actually matter to me in practice:
- Generation takes 30s–2min depending on the model. It streams (SSE), so I'm not staring at a spinner wondering if it hung.
- Translation is bidirectional — Chinese ↔ English. Code blocks and technical terms survive the trip, which was the dealbreaker in every other tool I tested.
- Publish is one click after a one-time WordPress connection. Draft if I want to review, direct publish if I don't.
- A "Humanizer" pass strips the tells — you know the ones: "firstly, secondly, finally", "it's worth noting that", the five-paragraph essay structure that no human chooses on purpose.
It uses your own API key, and that's the point
No vendor lock-in. It supports 20+ providers — Qwen, DeepSeek, Zhipu GLM, Doubao, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Kimi, Mistral, Groq, and a bunch of others.
More importantly: the API calls go directly from my machine. The key sits in a local config file and never passes through someone's server. For a tool that publishes to my blog with my credentials, that was non-negotiable.
When it comes to costs, one thing often comes as a surprise: using my own API account, the expense for generating a complete article is typically just a few cents or even a fraction of a cent (since I write in Chinese, the actual cost is often just a small fraction of a yuan). In contrast, one could achieve the same result by subscribing to a writing service that costs between $20 and $40 per month.
You can actually tune it
The usual complaint about AI writers is that everything comes out sounding like the same intern wrote it. The config page lets me set:
- Author persona — mine says "frontend engineer, 5 years"
- Target reader — e.g. beginners vs. people who already know this stuff
- Article type & style — tutorial, experience post, review; formal or casual
- Extra requirements — "include 3 code examples", that kind of thing
- Temperature / max tokens — and a separate temperature for the Humanizer, so I control how aggressively it rewrites
The honest part: setup isn't zero-friction
I'm not going to pretend you download it and you're done. First run takes 10–15 minutes and involves:
- Creating a WordPress Application Password (Users → Profile → Application Passwords)
- Getting an API key from whichever model provider you want
- Checking that your security plugin hasn't disabled the REST API — Wordfence and friends love doing this, and it breaks everything in a confusing way
- Optionally a Tavily key if you want live web search while writing (free tier is 1,000 calls/month)
The product ships with a full readme folder — setup guide with screenshots per platform, a model-name reference table (model names change annoyingly often), an error-code troubleshooting table, and a user guide. But yeah, if you've never generated an application password before, step 1 will surprise you. The guide covers it.
After the first setup, you never touch config again.
Who it's for / who should skip it
Worth it if: you run a WordPress site and publish regularly; you want bilingual posts without doing the work twice; you're tired of subscriptions for things that should be one-time.
Skip it if: you publish twice a year, or you're happy with your current setup. It's $6.99 — not worth agonizing over either way.
Links
- Product: Blog Automation Kit on Gumroad — $6.99 one-time
- Full review with more screenshots: auraimagai.com — AI Write & Auto-Publish to WordPress
Full setup + user guides in English and Chinese are included with purchase. No affiliation with WordPress or any model provider — I built the thing.
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