Managing a music blog, even in 2020 where most of the things can be automatized, is very time consuming; find the latest news, write the article with the right formatting, share it on social media, and create the advertising materials are only a few of our daily task.
We, at The Groove Cartel, are always focused on the improvement of our platform, creating the most efficient way to deliver content without compromise the quality. This is why we have created this Instagram Stories automatic generator tool, unique of its genre.
The idea was born a long time ago when Instagram has introduced the chance to attach external links to the stories. This has been a very powerful tool for bloggers and content creators in general. This new function turned out very useful to news sites that were able to share their articles with an even bigger audience easily.
A new way to share content usually means new content to create and, with it, more time to spend creating it. Posting an article on Instagram Stories could be easy but really time-consuming (at least if you want something more than a black background with the swipe up icon).
The common process now is to create a fancy mockup in Photoshop (or any other image editing software) and, every time a new article came out, use it but updating the background image, title and subtitle with one of the articles just posted. A couple of minutes if you have to do it once in a while but what if the number of new articles per day is bigger?
For this reason, we have decided to automate the process creating a tool in Python that automatically does it for us. So, how it works?
How automatically turn your articles from WordPress (or any other site) into Instagram Stories
First thing first, the tool needs an RSS feed to check. Most of the time all the information you need to create such images for Instagram Stories is stored in the RSS feed. In our case, the article subtitle isn’t accessible from the RSS feed so we needed to crawl the entire article web page searching for it.
Knowing all the information we have used the incredible Python PIL library by Alex Clark to generate the needed image for Instagram Stories.
The tool automatically finds the article’s featured image and processes it, resizing in an Instagram-friendly aspect ratio and it even adds some enhanced to the image making it more “tasty”. With another series of operations, the tool automatically places the title and subtitle text in the center of the image and save the result on your PC or server.
Below you can find a side by side comparison of our article and the image generated from it for Instagram Stories.
The tool is still in development. For example, at the moment only one template is available to use (you can see it above on the right). Our goal is to have a decent amount to choose from.
Another thing we are working on is the ability to automatically post the images on Instagram. At the moment, Instagram doesn’t allow to automate this so, the user still needs to manually open the Instagram app and upload the image, adding the link, from there.
Despite being under development, the tool is available to test if requested. You can go over our contact page and ask for it by sending an email to the Tech Area.
