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How I Wired Up Fully-Automated Cross-Posting Between Blogger and dev.to (With Working Code)

The last two posts on this blog went out through a pipeline I built specifically so I wouldn't have to manually copy-paste content between platforms. Here's the actual setup, in case you're trying to do the same thing. The goal One command, two platforms: publish to Blogger (where this blog actually lives) and have it show up on dev.to at the same time, without dev.to's copy counting against the original for search ranking purposes. Piece 1: Blogger, via its own API Blogger still has a working API (v3), authenticated through standard OAuth — no service-account keys needed, which matters if your Google Cloud project has an org policy blocking those (mine did). A one-time browser login gets you a refresh token; after that, a script can call posts().insert() or posts().update() and posts().publish() without touching a browser again. Piece 2: dev.to, via its API dev.to exposes a simple REST API gated by a personal API key (generate one under Settings → Extension...
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I Compared the Free Tiers of Google Flow, Kling AI, and Hailuo So You Don't Have To

In my last post , I mentioned pivoting away from AI-generated video after digging into the free tiers of the big three tools. Here's the actual digging — what each one gives you for free, and where the fine print gets in the way. I'm not affiliated with any of these tools. I just wanted a straight answer to "can I use this for a monetized channel without paying," and it took longer to find than it should have. The short version Tool Free credits Renewal Max clip length (free) Watermark Commercial use on free tier Google Flow (Veo 3.1) ~50 Daily 8 seconds "Made with Veo" visible Unclear — see below Kling AI ~66 Daily ~5 seconds per generation Visible Explicitly excluded Hailuo / MiniMax 200 One-time (new account bonus) ~6 seconds (768p) Visible Explicitly excluded Google Flow (Veo 3.1) Flow bundles Veo 3.1 (video), an image model, and a music model into one workspace. The free allotment is roughly 50 credits a day, n...
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I Tried to Build a Free AI Shorts Channel. Here's Why I Pivoted to Writing Instead.

I wanted one thing: a fully automated, zero-cost pipeline that could turn an idea into a YouTube Short, start to finish, using nothing but free tools and an AI coding assistant. No stock footage subscriptions, no editing software, no manual screen recording. Just a script in, a video out. I got closer than I expected. Then I hit a wall that had nothing to do with code. What actually got built Over one long session, the pipeline came together piece by piece: Text-to-speech via Google Cloud's free tier (WaveNet/Neural2 voices, a few million free characters a month — far more than a couple of Shorts a week would ever use) Visuals generated entirely in code (Python + Pillow): chat-bubble mockups, file-browser mockups, "results" grids, all procedurally drawn, no stock assets Assembly via ffmpeg, stitching narration, captions, and generated slides into a finished vertical video One orchestration script tying it all together, so a new video was just: drop in a scr...
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