Imagine planning a LinkedIn post…
…only to realize later that you’ve scheduled it in the totally wrong slot.
LinkedIn’s UI is great for writing posts, but when it comes to seeing your entire editorial schedule, it’s like trying to navigate a star map with half the constellations missing. You see one scheduled post at a time, no real calendar, no conflict detection. Just vibes.
At some point I thought:
“Why not build a small InBuddy utility that downloads all my scheduled posts and shows them on a proper calendar?”
That tiny spark set off a surprisingly fun chain of engineering experiments.
From annoyance to “automation magic”
The initial idea was straightforward:
Build something inside InBuddy that:
- opens LinkedIn,
- grabs all scheduled posts,
- and displays them in a calendar and a filterable list.
My first attempt was the “obvious” one: use LinkedIn’s APIs.
And of course… it failed spectacularly (for the right reasons).
Trying to authenticate with session cookies:
- is brittle,
- goes against platform rules,
- and would make any extension look like it’s poking LinkedIn’s backend in ways it shouldn’t.
So I ditched the backend approach entirely.
Instead of talking to LinkedIn, I decided to behave like a very fast, very disciplined user.
If you are a TLDR; person, here is a quick demo.
The plan: automate the actual UI
I built a micro-automation that:
- Opens LinkedIn in a new tab
- Opens the post composer (profile or company page)
- Clicks “Schedule”
- Opens the “View all scheduled posts” section
- Scrolls and hits “Show more” until everything is loaded
- For each scheduled post, extracts:
- post text
- scheduled date/time (parsed from extremely messy aria-labels)
- image URLs (if any)
While this dance happens, InBuddy displays a progress overlay showing each step unfolding in real time—almost like watching a tiny robot politely click through the UI for you.
After gathering everything, the tool saves it into the extension’s storage with all needed details.
And immediately, in Draft Studio, you can switch between:
🗓 Calendar view — all posts arranged by day
📋 Table view — content, dates, images, filters
It works for:
- personal profiles
- company pages
Right now the date parsing works when LinkedIn is set to English, because the date formats in other locales are wonderfully chaotic… but support for more languages is coming.
The “almost magical” part
I built the whole feature with Cursor as my co-pilot.
Not in the “generate everything” way. More in the:
“Let me walk you through my thought process, and you translate it into code.”
Step after step:
- describe the action
- generate code
- test on LinkedIn’s UI
- adjust
- repeat
Ironically, I spent more time refining the UI of Draft Studio than writing the automation logic.
The workflow of “open → click → scroll → extract → save” started working shockingly quickly.
Why I’m sharing this
Because this little experiment reminded me of something:
- You don’t always need a massive product to improve your workflow
- Sometimes all you need is a laser-focused utility that solves a very specific pain
- And with modern tools—Cursor in this case—building such utilities feels a bit like tinkering with enchanted gadgets in a nerdy workshop
If you’ve ever lost track of your scheduled LinkedIn posts, trust me—you’re not alone.
And yes, we can absolutely build the tiny tools that bring clarity… and a sprinkle of magic. ✨
Nerd @ Work, signing out.
