Articles
Write-ups from the work. MCP servers, AI workflows, content engineering, search, and the occasional tangent. Most of these come from problems I hit on real engagements, written up so the next person does not have to figure it out from scratch.
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Claude Code: The Complete Beginner's Guide
I've been running Claude Code every day for the last few months. MCP servers, articles across three sites, Python scripts, content workflows that run from research straight through to WordPress upload. Nothing's changed how I work this…
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How to Run a Free AI Content Detector Locally (RAID #1, No Upload)
The #1-ranked AI detector is free, runs on your own PC, and never uploads your text - unlike Originality.ai or GPTZero. Here's how to run it, or the tool I built.
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· claude-code · mcpThe Best MCP Servers for Claude Code (2026)
The MCP servers I run in Claude Code every day. Rebuilt for the agentic-coding-as-default era - native /agents, the Desktop/Code binary merger, and the local-model offload pattern that keeps long sessions from burning your Anthropic quota.
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Best PC for Local AI & LLMs 2026: 21 Tested Builds
VRAM decides everything when running local AI and LLMs. I've tested 21 PCs across six tiers - from a £200 RTX 3060 entry build to the £8,499 Mac Studio M3 Ultra - showing exactly which GPU runs which model size and at what tokens per second.
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Better Search Console: Analyse Your Google Search Console Data with Interactive Dashboards
Every MCP server that connects to Google Search Console has the same fundamental limitation. The API returns a maximum of 1,000 rows per request. One or two requests in, and you've consumed your context window. This problem is quite…
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Claude for Excel (2026): What Works, What Bites & Prompts to Steal
Claude for Excel went GA in May 2026. What works, the permission default that still bites, and copy-paste prompts for lookups, #N/A fixes and data cleaning.
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· mcp · claude-desktopBest MCP Servers for Claude Desktop (2026)
The MCP servers I run in Claude Desktop, grouped by job: SEO, finance, research, browser, filesystem. My real install order and the ones worth skipping.
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How will AI Affect Content Marketing in 2026?
Not all that long ago, I found myself trying to find an answer to a question about the PSU I might need for a PC accessory. I was alarmed to see that my site wasn’t in the results for the query, because that information wasn’t featured in…
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Building a Free, Open Source SEO Crawler for LLM Consumption
I wanted to build on my experience working with the MCP protocol SDK to see just how far we can extend an AI assistant's capabilities. I decided that I'd quite like to build a crawler to check my site's "technical SEO" health and came…
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Generate a Tone of Voice Guide with Voice Analyser MCP
While AI will never replace human creativity, it can certainly help with productivity. Today I'm sharing my Voice Analyser MCP - an experimental tone of voice guideline generator that runs from a website's XML sitemap. The point of this…
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Case Study: Automating XML Jobs feeds with AI
Update: in this post I mentioned I'm working on a project that produces job xml feeds called YubHub - we're now live and you can find out more about how it works here. A big problem for start-up or growth-focused jobs board sites is…
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AI SEO - A Tool to Help You Improve Your Content for AI Search
Not that long ago, I was searching for an answer to a question about a USB device and whether it needed a separate PSU. This happened to be a topic very close to my heart, and owning a handful of affiliate content sites on the topic, this…
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How to Make Charts and Data Visualisation with the Data Commons MCP
This morning I found myself tasked with analysing a dataset for a client. While the analysis will be via SEMrush data exports and Python scripts to format the data I need, I was slightly procrastinating at the thought of having to draw…
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Content Marketing Using AI: the Right Way
You can't get away with AI copy if you want your SEO performance to be reliable. My conclusion: AI should be used to enhance human productivity - it can't replace human creativity. But, I do think we can use AI to build interesting…
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Working with AI: Using Gmail in Claude
I've got a client over in Australia who are *just* warming up after a lengthy Christmas break. It's an SAP B1 integration with Shopify and Onetimpim - many moving parts! My client emailed this morning asking for a catch-up meeting and…
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RAG Without RAG: How to Make a Content Research Index for Claude
This weekend's project started with a simple need: collect the transcripts from around 20 YouTube videos from my client's Youtube channel, for a research corpus. The goal was to accurately use the Youtube data to reference in the content…
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Automating Tax Receipt Downloads with Gmail API and Docling
Featured image: Docling analysing 200+ pdfs and converting to simple markdown How does anyone keep track of business expenses for UK self-assessment? For me, this started because I run multiple projects - SimRacingCockpit, this site…
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Create an XML Feed with Google Sheets
I recently had the challenge of facilitating regularly scraped data into an XML feed. In the past, I've devised all sorts of ways to scrape, and prepare data, for example, for retailer and affiliate feeds. So, if you need to be able to…
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Query Fan-Out MCP for AI Search Optimisation
I've been building a group of content optimisation tools for the past six months (some availabe on houtini's github, some coming soon). It's really clear that traditional keyword research is now quite broken and outdated for AI search. Not…
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AI in Finance: Using "Financial Modeling Prep" MCP for Real-Time Market Data in Claude
The obvious Financial Modeling Prep MCP used HTTP transport; Claude Desktop needs stdio, so I rebuilt it as @houtini/fmp-mcp. The setup, the gotchas and live stock data.
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How to Use Firecrawl in Claude Desktop
I've spent the past few months building YubHub (launch coming soon), a job aggregator that feeds our Motorsport jobs site, fluidjobs.com. The scraper needs to pull job listings from career sites across Formula 1, automotive engineering…
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Desktop Commander MCP: Give Claude Full Control of Your Computer (2026)
Desktop Commander is the MCP that gives Claude full read-write access to your computer - files, terminal, code. The setup guide that's missing from the docs, plus the gotchas that catch people on day one.
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· claude-code · claude-desktopGetting Started with Claude Desktop: a Beginner's Guide (2026)
The first hour with Claude Desktop can be confusing - browser, app, Cowork, Claude Code all at once. Here's how the four modes fit together and where to start.
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The Rinse / Repeat Technique in Efficient LLM Context Window Use
I've found lengthy prompt threads cumbersome, particularly in Sonnet 4.5 , where, for some reason Claude absolutely loves to create lengthy summary documents and then, a summary of the summary. This is all incredibly content hogging stuff…
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