Building a News Portal in Two Hours—Powered by AI Sidekicks

Wednesday, June 4th, 2024

Picture this: I roll out of bed for a 9 AM client photo shoot, only to get a “postponed” text at the very last minute. Suddenly, two hours stretch into an open window. After grabbing a quick bite, I opened my laptop at 1 PM and thought, “Let’s make this afternoon count.” Spoiler: by 3 PM, DHK Creative had a live, SEO-friendly news portal—thanks to Cursor AI and the ChatGPT Codex Software Engineer Agent. Here’s how it all went down, why it matters for Bangladesh’s creative scene, and a peek at what comes next.

1:00 PM – Surprise Free Time & Cursor AI to the Rescue

I hit my computer at 1 PM sharp, navigating into the Laravel repo. First order of business: lay down the database. I prompted Cursor AI:

“Create a migration for a 'articles' table with fields: title, slug, content, excerpt, featured_image, and timestamps.”

By 1:05 PM, my migrations folder had a fresh migration file. A quick 'php artisan migrate' later, and the articles table existed. Next, I told Cursor AI:

“Generate a Article Controller with methods for index, show, create, store, edit, update, delete.”

By 1:15 PM, I had a full controller skeleton in In those fifteen minutes, the backend foundation was effectively done—no boilerplate typing for me.

1:15 PM – Tailwind & Blade = Instant Frontend Glow-Up

With the backend structure ready, it was time to make the portal look fresh. At 1:15

PM, I nudged Cursor AI again:

“Build a responsive Blade view for listing posts as Tailwind cards, plus a single-post page layout.”

By 1:30 PM, I was tweaking the Tailwind color palette (think DHK Creative’s signature yellow and charcoal gray) and adding subtle hover animations. Suddenly, a sleek, mobile-first grid appeared. Each card featured an image, title, and excerpt snippet. On desktop it’s a multi-column layout; on mobile, it gracefully collapses to one column—automatically, without me wrestling with CSS. Frontend magic in less than fifteen minutes.

1:45 PM – Slugs, Excerpts & SEO Magic with Codex

Now for the secret sauce: search-engine love. I called on the ChatGPT Codex

Software Engineer Agent:

“Codex, show me how to auto-generate a unique slug from a post’s title in Laravel.

By 1:50 PM, I had a clean observer snippet:

Post::creating(function ($post) {
    $baseSlug = Str::slug($post->title);
    $slug     = $baseSlug;
    $count    = 1;
    while (Post::where('slug', $slug)->exists()) {
        $slug = "{$baseSlug}-{$count}";
        $count++;
    }
    $post->slug = $slug;
});

I pasted that into my 'article' model and never looked back—slugs sorted themselves out automatically.

Next, I needed smart meta descriptions. A quick Codex request—“Give me a helper function to strip HTML tags and limit content to 150 characters”—returned:

public static function excerpt($content) {
    return Str::limit(strip_tags($content), 150);
}

By 2 PM, every article would automatically spit out a polished, SEO-friendly excerpt for its meta description, Efficiency, unlocked.

2:00 PM – Dynamic Meta Tags & Social Previews

At 2 PM, it was time to integrate social-preview goodies. I slotted dynamic Open Graph and Twitter Card tags into the Blade layout:

<meta property="og:title" content="{{ $post->title }}">
<meta property="og:description" content="{{ $post->excerpt }}">
<meta property="og:image" content="{{ asset('storage/' . $post->featured_image) }}">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">

By 2:10 PM, I tested sharing a draft article on Slack and saw a perfect social preview. (Cue the little applause emoji.)

2:15 PM – Sitemap, Robots.txt & Deployment Prep

At 2:15 PM (thank you, Laravel package). Then I dropped a robots.txt in the public/ folder:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: https://dhkcreative.space/sitemap.xml

By 2:20 PM, everything was staged and waiting for final tweaks. The portal had:

Backend: Migrations, controller, and automatic slugs/excerpts.
Frontend: Responsive Tailwind card grid, single-post pages, and smooth styling.
SEO Basics: Dynamic meta tags, social previews, sitemaps, and robots.txt.

2:20 PM – Final Tweaks & QA

From 2:20 PM to 3 PM, I:

Added hover states and slight animations to the article cards.
Verified responsiveness on Safari, Chrome, and Firefox—no layout quirks on mobile.
Proofread copy to catch any stray “lorem ipsum” or typos.
Ran speed tests to ensure pages load in under two seconds (mission accomplished).
Confirmed SEO meta tags and OG images for a handful of sample posts.

A bit of CSS adjustment here, a smidge of caching logic there (thanks to a Codex tip on Cache Remember for the homepage query), and by 3 PM, the portal was polished, published, and live.

Why This Matters for Bangladesh’s Creative Scene

Speed Inspires Action - If I can turn a sudden, free afternoon into a live, production-ready portal in two hours, anyone from a one-person design studio to a student art club can do the same. No long dev sprints, no big budgets—just a laptop, Laravel, and AI helpers.
Real-Time Relevance - In our world, timing is everything: gallery openings, midnight improv jams, last-minute film fests—now we can post those updates in minutes, not days. DHK Creative’s portal becomes the go-to “What’s happening right now?” hub for creatives across Bangladesh.
Spark for Regional Growth - Word travels fast in Dhaka’s creative circles. When other collectives in Chittagong, Sylhet, or Khulna see this AI-powered portal going live in an afternoon, they’ll think, “Let’s do the same.” Before long, we’ll have a constellation of niche portals—design.dhkcreative.com, music.dhkcreative.com, film.dhkcreative.com—each live in an afternoon, all feeding into a pan–South Asian creative network.

Pros, Cons & What’s Next

Pros

Lightning-Fast Launch: Two hours of coding spread across one afternoon yields a live news portal.
Built-In Best Practices: AI ensures Laravel conventions, Tailwind’s mobile-first design, and SEO guidelines are all baked in.
Cost-Effective MVP: No five-person dev team required—just one developer, a laptop, and AI assistants.
Scalable Base: Today it’s text articles; tomorrow, we add podcasts, video galleries, or even virtual reality tours.

Cons

Similarity Risk: If everyone uses the same AI scaffolding, sites can look alike. Unique design iterations are essential to stand out.
AI Dependency: AI is awesome—until APIs change or rate limits hit. Always keep your core coding skills sharp.
Feature Trade-Offs: Rushing meant postponing advanced features like user roles, comments, and analytics. Those will need “Version 2.0” attention.

Future Fun Hypotheses

Micro-Portals Everywhere: Launch hyper-local editions—music.dhkcreative.com, design.dhkcreative.com, etc.—each live in an afternoon, generating a network of specialized creative hubs.
AI-Powered Summaries & Translations: Soon we’ll integrate GPT-driven summaries for quick TL;DRs, plus Bangla↔English translation to expand our reach.
Sponsored “Featured Events”: Tiny “Featured Spotlight” boxes for local galleries—AI crafts the ad copy, we keep it tasteful, and revenue flows in.
Community-Curated Highlights: Readers vote on “Top Story of the Month,” and AI stitches together comments into a short video recap or newsletter edition. Community-first, AI-driven.

So there you have it: a postponed photo shoot turned into a fully polished, SEO-smart news portal for DHK Creative—built in one afternoon, all wrapped up by 3 PM. Cursor AI handled the boilerplate, and ChatGPT Codex delivered razor-sharp code snippets right when I needed them. This isn’t just a coding flex—it’s proof that any creative collective in Bangladesh (or anywhere) can launch a professional platform in record time.

What’s next? AI-powered content curation, hyper-local micro-sites, maybe even VR gallery tours—all built in an afternoon. The door is wide open, and the next chapter is going to be epic. Keep an eye on DHK Creative—this is only the beginning.

Rabbi Mehedi 🇧🇩