A comprehensive overhaul of a high-volume media platform, featuring a custom Node.js automation pipeline, AI-driven content enrichment, and a bespoke Genesis child theme.
Unlike agency builds involving separate teams for backend and frontend, this entire ecosystem was architected, coded, and deployed by a single self-taught developer. This unified vision allowed for rapid iteration and tight integration between the Node.js automation pipeline and the user experience.
The History of Westeros platform houses over a decade of multimedia content. As the archive grew to over 500 episodes, manual management became unsustainable. The site faced three critical bottlenecks:
Content was split between YouTube, Spotify, and WordPress with no unified synchronization, leading to duplicate entries.
Hundreds of older posts lacked meta-descriptions, tags, or internal linking, severely hampering SEO performance.
Publishing a single episode required manual cross-posting, tagging, and formatting across multiple platforms.
The existing theme could not support complex data structures like character taxonomies or dynamic artist galleries.
I engineered a custom Node.js Command Line Interface (CLI) to handle the heavy lifting. This toolkit interacts directly with the WordPress REST API, YouTube Data API, and Google Gemini API.
The content-adder.js script utilizes the Google Gemini API to analyze episode transcripts and metadata. It automatically generates two-paragraph SEO summaries for legacy content that previously had none.
internal-linker.js builds a graph of the entire site archive. When new content is posted, it scans the text for keywords (e.g., “Daenerys”, “Blackfyre”) and automatically injects HTML links to relevant past episodes, creating a self-sustaining SEO web.
$ node wordpress-toolkit.js smart-tag
[INFO] Scanning latest posts…
Found: “The Dance of Dragons – Part 2”
-> Generating Gemini AI Summary…
-> Success. 150 words added.
-> Mapping Internal Links…
-> Linked “Rhaenyra Targaryen” to post ID #402
-> Linked “Dragonpit” to post ID #115
Update Complete.
The theme was rebuilt as a custom Genesis child theme. I refactored the functions.php logic to stabilize the platform and ensure compatibility with modern PHP versions. This included creating dedicated templates like front-page.php for a unique homepage layout.
To maintain high performance while displaying large datasets, I wrote artist-list-loader.js. This script dynamically fetches and renders a list of over 350 artists only when needed, preventing DOM bloat and keeping initial page load speeds high.
Josefin Sans
Typography
A dynamic recognition system for hundreds of supporters. Replaced a static list with a searchable, tabbed interface that filters by tier, improving load times.
A dedicated content hub for the community read-along project. Completely rebuilt to centralize resources, schedule updates, and discussion links.
Consolidated fragmented affiliate links and shop items into a single, cohesive visual storefront, increasing click-through rates.
The modernization project successfully transitioned History of Westeros from a manual blog to a self-sustaining media platform. The new automation pipeline saves hours of weekly administrative time, while the AI-enhanced archive and community hubs provide a deeper, more interconnected experience for users.