Building a media commentary site is one thing. Keeping up with the content demands of one is another. That's why I decided to integrate an AI writing assistant directly into Talk About Media — and what surprised me most was how achievable it was, even starting from scratch with no coding background.

Here's how I did it, and how you can too.

‍

The Goal

I wanted a tool that lived on my own website, not another tab to juggle, that could help me draft articles, generate headlines, write social posts, and outline ideas on demand. Something that understood the Talk About Media voice and could turn notes on a broad range of topics into publishable content in seconds.

‍

The Solution: A Floating AI Widget

The end result is a small red button that sits in the corner of every page on the site. Click it, describe what you want to write, choose a content type including full article, headline options, intro paragraph, social post, or outline, then within seconds Claude generates a draft ready to copy into the CMS.

It took one afternoon to build. Here's the process.

‍

Step 1: Connect to Webflow

Using Claude's Webflow integration, the AI was able to connect directly to talkaboutmedia.com.au and inject a custom script into the site's footer, meaning the widget appears on every page without touching a single line of Webflow's visual editor.

‍

Step 2: Build a Secure Proxy

The smartest part of this setup isn't the widget itself, it's the security layer behind it. Rather than calling the AI API directly from the browser (which would expose your private API key to anyone who inspected the page source), the widget routes requests through a small proxy server hosted on Vercel, a free cloud platform.

Think of it like a receptionist: the website asks the receptionist to make a call, the receptionist dials using their own phone, and your private number is never shared.

Setting this up involved creating two small files on my computer and running a handful of commands in PowerShell, something I'd never done before. With step-by-step guidance it took about twenty minutes.

‍

Step 3: Add the API Key

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, provides API keys that act like a password for accessing the AI. Once generated at console.anthropic.com, the key gets stored securely inside Vercel's environment settings, locked away on the server, never visible to the public.

‍

Step 4: Deploy and Test

With the proxy live and the key in place, one final deployment command pushed everything to production. After a hard refresh of the site, the widget connected successfully and generated its first article, an intro about the founder of Talk About Media, in under ten seconds.

‍

What It Means for Content Creation

This kind of integration changes the workflow significantly. Instead of opening a separate AI tool, copying prompts, and pasting results back into a CMS, the assistant lives where the work happens. It knows the site's context, can be prompted with rough notes or dot points, and produces output that's ready to edit and publish.

For a small media operation, that's a meaningful efficiency gain.

‍

Could You Do This on Your Site?

Yes! And you don't need to be a developer, I'm definitely not!. The tools exist, the platforms are free at the scale most independent publishers operate at, and the process is well-documented. The hardest part is getting comfortable with PowerShell for about fifteen minutes.

If you're running a Webflow site and want to explore adding an AI layer to your content workflow, the stack used here (Claude API, Vercel, and a simple proxy function) is a solid starting point.

‍

‍