Fast and Predictable Blog Post Summaries with AI
Anatoly Mironov
Today, after I upgraded hugo and its theme ananke to the latest versions, I discovered that the automatic summaries do not work very well (unnecessary markup and broken images). They are simply based on the summaryLength property (default 70 words).
Truncating text is definitely not the best approach now that GenAI exists, is it? Since the summary can be defined with Front Matter, then it is much smarter to make use of it. Providing summaries to all the old blog posts would take a long time.
I have tried AI for blog post summarization (in Azure AI Foundry using gpt4o-mini). It worked perfectly. I may have exaggerated a bit by asking to create a click-bait, but this is just an example. The good thing is that I can change the tone and the style of summaries to whatever I want. I can also automate the whole thing and re-create the summaries in whatever tonality and format I would find appropriate in the future.
Another approach would be to automate the summary in the blog build process, but perhaps, creating a summary with AI ad hoc is good enough for now. Hand-crafting summaries will always be the best. However, it’s good to have alternatives.
