How I Use Hermes to Streamline My Blog Writing Flow

I build things for a living, and I learn a lot in the process — tools, shortcuts, decisions that worked, decisions that didn't, weird bugs, stuff I notice. Most of it evaporates. I'd think "I should write that down," and then I wouldn't.

The problem was never the thinking. It was the publishing. By the time I'd opened a CMS, formatted things, copy-pasted into the right fields, and hit publish, the thought was cold. Too many steps. So most of what I learned just… disappeared.

I wanted to fix that. So I wired an AI agent called Hermes into my publishing flow. Now a thought goes from my head to my blog in one Telegram message. Here's how it works.

The stack

Four pieces, each doing one job:

• Astro — the blog frontend. Static, fast, mine.
• Directus — headless CMS. Sits behind the blog as the content API.
• Hermes — an AI agent running on my VPS. The bridge between Telegram and Directus.
• Obsidian vault — local markdown files. The source of truth for everything.

How it works

I send a message to a Telegram thread. That's the whole input. Hermes does the rest:

1. Captures the message as a markdown file in my Obsidian vault — frontmatter, tags, timestamp, all generated automatically.
2. Publishes it to Directus via its API, using a scoped author token.
3. Confirms back in Telegram with a one-liner.

For short notes, it publishes instantly — they go live right away. For longer posts like this one, it saves as a draft so I can review and tweak before publishing.

Two types of content

Notes are the daily driver. One to five lines, no polish. A TIL, a progress update, a quick rant, a decision I made. I send them as they come to me, and they're on the blog before the thought is even finished. This is where most of my output lives — raw, instant, and honest.

Posts are when something is worth more than a few lines. Maybe a note keeps nagging at me, or three notes cluster around the same topic, and I want to expand. Hermes saves these as drafts. I review, edit, and publish when it's ready.

Why Hermes

I didn't pick Hermes by accident. I tried it locally first — ran it on my machine, used it for a while, liked how it worked. When it came to solving this publishing friction, it was the obvious fit.

Hermes runs on my VPS, talks to Telegram, writes to my Obsidian vault, and pushes to Directus through its API. But the real reason I picked it is that it acts as memory. When I'm deep in active work, I forget things — what I decided last week, why I chose this tool over that one, what broke and how I fixed it. Hermes captures all of it. Every note, timestamped and tagged, sitting in the vault ready for whenever I need it.

I needed something that could be a second brain and handle the publishing pipeline. Hermes was built for exactly this.

Kept simple, kept safe

The system is deliberately narrow. The Directus author token is scoped to create-only on the notes and posts collections — no admin access, no deletes, no destructive operations. Hermes can publish content. That's it.

The vault is the source of truth, not Directus. Every note and post lives as markdown on my machine, with a directus_id in the frontmatter linking it back to the published version. If Directus goes down, if the VPS catches fire, nothing is lost. The words are mine.

The point

I'm not trying to build a publishing empire. I'm trying to remove every excuse I have for not capturing what I learn and do every day.

The thought-to-published path used to be: open laptop → open CMS → log in → format → publish. Now it's: send a message. That's it.

Friction was the enemy. This killed it.