From poem to post: my poetry site feeds flayr on its own
Publishing a poem on my site drops it into flayr, which builds a carousel and a stock-footage video for it: 15 videos for 12 poems so far, and nothing posts until I approve it.
Sep 12 – Sep 23, 2026 (pipeline build); posting not started yet
The problem
My poems live on life.mdostal.com, with Sanity as the editor. The goal for this build: publishing a poem on the site is the only manual step, and nothing goes out on social until I approve it.
This is a build story for now; the numbers come later. Poems are the next area flayr is improving, and a progression video is coming.
How flayr was used
- 1
Publishing a poem on the site creates a flayr draft
A Sanity webhook on publish, plus a "Push to Flayr" action in Studio, sends the poem's title and text to flayr's content API. It lands as a draft. Nothing is scheduled, and Sanity stays the source of truth.
- 2
flayr fixed what the push exposed
The first real run from the site exposed flayr bugs. Each was fixed and merged on Sep 21: external workflow triggers now work, v2 video generation actually runs, the video status API reports stock-overlay jobs correctly, the image endpoint gained a stock-overlay style, and overlay text no longer renders as empty boxes in production.
- 3
A webhook-triggered workflow turns each poem into a carousel
The "Poem auto-visual: carousel + approval" workflow runs a webhook trigger, a stock carousel step and an approval gate. Slides keep the poem's own words, with stanzas on stock photos matched to the poem, and the result opens in the per-slide carousel editor.
- 4
The same poem becomes a stock-footage video with the words over it
A second workflow requests a 9:16 stock-overlay video. flayr finds stock footage that fits the poem (headstones for "Rest", campfire flames for "Growth", a wheat field for "Wheat") and reveals the poem stanza by stanza over it, with no audio.
- 5
Nothing posts until I approve it
Both workflows end in an approval gate, and the site only calls draft-creating endpoints, never the publish API. Every carousel and video waits in Pending Approvals until I act on it.
What we’d do differently
- Dogfooding from an outside site found flayr bugs our own dashboard never hit: a video endpoint whose jobs were never processed, and an overlay compositor whose text was unreadable in production. Both were fixed within a day.
- Stock footage with the poem's words over it is the right format for poems, not a cost shortcut.
- What's next: this is a build story today, because nothing has posted yet. Poems are the next area we improve in flayr. A progression video is coming, then the first approved batch, and then this page gets real numbers.
Credits
- Poems, words and site
- Mathew Dostal, co-founder of flayr and founder of Firefly Events
- Background footage and photos
- Pexels contributors, via flayr's stock search
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