Iceland Now: AI News Publisher
Custom WordPress plugin that runs an entire AI editorial pipeline for IcelandNow.org: news ingestion, topic research, trend detection, Claude-written drafts, dual-source imagery, SEO and internal linking, all quality-gated before publish.
What the Pipeline Handles
Built and hardened over 2+ years of production iteration, version by version.
328 news items and 113 evergreen travel topics, fetched hourly and auto-replenished. The pipeline is never short of what to write next.
Detected from real-time news velocity across sources, then written and published the same day instead of waiting for the next daily batch.
2 news articles plus 1 travel article generated inside an 11:30 to 12:00 daily window; every draft carries a visible quality score (53 to 90+) before it ever reaches review.
One Plugin, an Entire Editorial Pipeline
IcelandNow.org needed a steady stream of Iceland-focused travel and news content without a full editorial team behind it. We built a self-contained WordPress plugin that handles the entire pipeline. It pulls from configured RSS feeds and scraped Icelandic news listings, maintains a demand-ranked queue of evergreen travel topics, and runs a trend-detection engine that catches breaking stories (like a pilot strike) while they’re still hot.
Claude writes every draft in a journalist or travel-writer voice. An Iceland-relevance filter runs at both fetch and generation time to keep foreign and hyperlocal-only stories out, and images are sourced in parallel from Flickr and Unsplash, scored and matched, with a 500-photo memory so nothing repeats. Every draft is scored against a quality gate before it’s even illustrated; anything below the bar is skipped rather than published.
What passes gets Yoast SEO meta, schema.org markup, and up to four internal links into existing posts, then lands in an admin dashboard for a final human review before it goes live. Alongside the automated batches, a “Write an Article” tool lets the team generate a single on-demand piece from just a topic (and optionally a source URL to ground it in), with a length dial running from a tight 450 to 700 word rewrite up to a 1,300 to 1,800 word in-depth guide, saved as a draft or published immediately.
Built to Get Smarter, Not Just Bigger
Every version has tightened something real: foreign stories slipping through Icelandic sources, Claude mistranslating Icelandic place names, low-score drafts vanishing instead of staying for review. The result is a publisher that catches its own mistakes before they go live, not one that just outputs more.
More work
Iceland Review: Editorial Platform Rebuild
Iceland's leading English-language news portal and travel adviser, rebuilt on WordPress with ad revenue treated as a core requirement from day one, not bolted on afterward.
What’s On: Reykjavík Events Platform
Figma design turned into a pixel-accurate WordPress and Elementor build for Reykjavík's event guide since 1994, with a continuously updated events calendar pulled live from an external API.
Líparít: Advertising Agency
Líparít came to us with a finished Figma design for their new site. We rebuilt it faithfully in WordPress and Elementor, translating every layout and type detail into a fully editable, self-manageable portfolio site.