Ready to build your first workflow? 🚀 n8n is an open-source automation tool that gives you the power to connect different apps and services to create a seamless workflow, and it's a perfect way to dip your toes into automation without a huge learning curve.

Workflow Building 101: The Basics 🧠

An n8n workflow is a sequence of nodes connected together. Think of it like a train: the first node is the engine, and each subsequent node is a car, each performing a specific task.

• Trigger Node: This is the starting point of your workflow. It listens for a specific event—like a new email, a scheduled time, or a webhook request—to start the automation.

• Action Nodes: These nodes perform a task, such as sending an email, creating a new row in a Google Sheet, or posting a message to Slack. You connect them one after another to build your automation chain.

All nodes are easily found in the sidebar. You simply drag and drop them onto the canvas and connect them with a line.

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Use Case: Creating a Professional Presentation from Blog Posts

Let's build a real-world workflow. The goal is to automatically take the latest blog posts from your website, summarize them with an AI, and then use that summary to generate a professional presentation. This is a great example of an automation that saves you a ton of time.

Step 1: The Trigger

We'll start with a Cron node. This is a trigger node that runs on a schedule. You can set it to run once a week, every day at a specific time, or even every few minutes. This is perfect for checking your blog for new content without you lifting a finger.

Step 2: Get the Blog Posts

Next, add an RSS Feed Read node. This node will read the latest articles from your blog's RSS feed. You just need to provide the URL for your blog's RSS feed. This is where the magic of n8n's integrations comes in; it handles the complexities of fetching data for you.

Step 3: Summarize with an AI

Now for the fun part! Connect an AI node, like the OpenAI Chat Model node, to the RSS feed node. In the node's settings, you'll need to configure your API credentials. Then, you can use a prompt to tell the AI what you want it to do, like:

"Summarize the following blog post and extract the 3 key takeaways. Format the output as a JSON object with 'title', 'summary', and 'key_takeaways' fields."

n8n passes the blog post content from the RSS feed node directly to this node, so you can dynamically use that data in your prompt.

Step 4: Create the Presentation

Finally, connect the AI node to a Google Slides node. You'll add an action like Create a Presentation and map the data from the AI node's output to the presentation's fields. You can use the title and summary to populate the slides. You can even use the key_takeaways to create bullet points. This automates a traditionally manual task.

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Free and Open-Source Resources

• Self-Hosting is Key: The beauty of n8n's open-source nature is that you can host it yourself. Services like Oracle Cloud's "Always Free" tier or even a micro EC2 instance on AWS can run n8n for free, giving you unlimited workflows and executions. This is a huge advantage over other platforms that charge per task or workflow.

• n8n Community: n8n has a huge and active community. You can find pre-built workflow templates for all sorts of use cases, from generating marketing reports to managing your social media, on their website.

• Documentation and Tutorials: The n8n documentation is excellent and provides step-by-step guides for creating all kinds of workflows, even if you are a total beginner.

This kind of project is a perfect way to start building your skills. It shows how you can combine free, open-source tools to create powerful, time-saving automations.

This video provides a practical example of setting up and using a free, self-hosted version of n8n.