Briefings

A post that repeats on a schedule and looks up its own facts every time: the weather, the feeds you follow, or a topic on the web.

Set it up

1. 1Tell Q in one sentence what you want and when, for example: every morning at 08:30, post the weather for Lelystad in #general.
2. 2Answer the four things it asks: where the facts come from, the subject, the time, and the channel. It writes the standing instruction for you.
3. 3Read the first issue and approve it. Approving does two things: the briefing goes live, and that issue becomes the style every later one is written against.

What to know

• It is not a scheduled message, which repeats text you already wrote and is yesterday's weather by the second day, and not an RSS feed, which posts one message per item instead of one composed post.
• Every source is opened before a word is written about it. A dead link, a link that bounces to another site, or one that lands on a front page instead of the story is dropped and counted, and the run says how many and why.
• Q is never given a web address and never writes one. It cites a number and the platform puts the checked address in, so a link in a briefing is always one that was opened.
• An issue where nothing checks out is not posted at all. An empty digest is worse than a quiet day.
• Weather comes from a meteorological service, never from the assistant's memory, and carries the credit that service's licence requires. That credit cannot be edited away.
• If an issue reads wrong, change the standing instruction rather than that issue: it is the field that decides the language, the length and the tone of every future one.
• Add a picture to the template once and every issue reuses it, rather than drawing a new one every morning.