On deepakness.com, I had 100+ blog posts that didn't have meta descriptions because for some reason descriptions didn't come back when I migrated my site from WordPress to 11ty. It wasn't possible to manually add "description" properties in the frontmatter to all those .md files for blog posts, so I created this Python script that automatically does that.
The script checks each markdown file in the /blog folder one-by-one, if the "description" property exists, it skips them and if there's no "description" then reads the entire blog post, sends a prompt to OpenAI's GPT-5 and then creates the "description".
Here's the entire script:
"""
Script to add descriptions to blog posts that don't have them.
Uses OpenAI GPT-5 API to generate descriptions under 140 characters.
"""
import os
import re
import requests
from pathlib import Path
OPENAI_API_KEY = "YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY"
BLOG_DIR = Path("content/blog")
API_URL = "https://api.openai.com/v1/responses"
def get_frontmatter_and_content(file_path: Path) -> tuple[str, str, str]:
"""
Parse a markdown file and return (frontmatter, content, full_text).
"""
with open(file_path, "r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
text = f.read()
match = re.match(r'^---\n(.*?)\n---\n(.*)$', text, re.DOTALL)
if match:
return match.group(1), match.group(2), text
return "", text, text
def has_description(frontmatter: str) -> bool:
"""
Check if frontmatter contains a description field.
"""
return bool(re.search(r'^description:', frontmatter, re.MULTILINE))
def generate_description(content: str, title: str) -> str:
"""
Use OpenAI GPT-5 to generate a description under 140 characters.
"""
truncated_content = content[:2000]
prompt = f"""Read the following blog post and create a brief description for it.
The description MUST be under 140 characters.
Do not use quotes around the description.
Just return the description text, nothing else.
Title: {title}
Content:
{truncated_content}"""
headers = {
"Content-Type": "application/json",
"Authorization": f"Bearer {OPENAI_API_KEY}"
}
payload = {
"model": "gpt-5",
"input": prompt
}
try:
response = requests.post(API_URL, headers=headers, json=payload)
response.raise_for_status()
data = response.json()
output = data.get("output", [])
description = ""
for item in output:
if item.get("type") == "message":
content = item.get("content", [])
for content_item in content:
if content_item.get("type") == "output_text":
description = content_item.get("text", "").strip()
break
if description:
break
if len(description) > 140:
description = description[:137] + "..."
return description
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
print(f" API Error: {e}")
return ""
except (KeyError, IndexError, TypeError) as e:
print(f" Parse Error: {e}")
return ""
def get_title_from_frontmatter(frontmatter: str) -> str:
"""
Extract title from frontmatter.
"""
match = re.search(r'^title:\s*["\']?(.+?)["\']?\s*$', frontmatter, re.MULTILINE)
if match:
return match.group(1).strip('"\'')
return "Untitled"
def add_description_to_frontmatter(frontmatter: str, description: str) -> str:
"""
Add description field to frontmatter after the title field.
"""
lines = frontmatter.split('\n')
new_lines = []
description_added = False
for line in lines:
new_lines.append(line)
if line.startswith('title:') and not description_added:
escaped_desc = description.replace('"', '\\"')
new_lines.append(f'description: "{escaped_desc}"')
description_added = True
return '\n'.join(new_lines)
def update_file(file_path: Path, frontmatter: str, content: str, new_frontmatter: str):
"""
Write updated content back to file.
"""
new_text = f"---\n{new_frontmatter}\n---\n{content}"
with open(file_path, "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
f.write(new_text)
def main():
if OPENAI_API_KEY == "your-openai-api-key-here":
print("⚠️ Please set your OpenAI API key in the script!")
print(" Edit add_descriptions.py and replace 'your-openai-api-key-here'")
return
blog_posts = list(BLOG_DIR.glob("*/index.md"))
print(f"Found {len(blog_posts)} blog posts")
print("-" * 50)
posts_updated = 0
posts_skipped = 0
posts_failed = 0
for post_path in sorted(blog_posts):
slug = post_path.parent.name
print(f"\nProcessing: {slug}")
frontmatter, content, _ = get_frontmatter_and_content(post_path)
if has_description(frontmatter):
print(f" ✓ Already has description, skipping")
posts_skipped += 1
continue
title = get_title_from_frontmatter(frontmatter)
print(f" → No description found, generating...")
description = generate_description(content, title)
if not description:
print(f" ✗ Failed to generate description")
posts_failed += 1
continue
print(f" → Generated: {description}")
new_frontmatter = add_description_to_frontmatter(frontmatter, description)
update_file(post_path, frontmatter, content, new_frontmatter)
print(f" ✓ Updated successfully")
posts_updated += 1
print("\n" + "=" * 50)
print(f"Summary:")
print(f" Updated: {posts_updated}")
print(f" Skipped (already had description): {posts_skipped}")
print(f" Failed: {posts_failed}")
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
You might need to tweak the script a bit to make it work for you, and also replace YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY with your OpenAI API key.
