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IN PROGRESS UK E-commerce social

A week of shop posts, auto-curated and scheduled.

A weekly command curates seven posts for the UnicorePrints Etsy shop and n8n publishes them to Instagram and Facebook — with self-refreshing Meta tokens so the pipeline can’t silently die.

/ at a glance /

OwnerUnicorePrints (own shop)
LocationUK
IndustryEtsy print shop
TypeInternal automation
StatusIn progress — awaiting go-live

7/week

posts auto-curated and scheduled, one per day

Measured · internal

~42

nodes in the n8n posting workflow (polls every 15 min)

Measured · internal

21 days

automatic IG token refresh — silent-lapse guard

Measured · internal

0

manual posts to IG or FB once activated

Estimate

/ the challenge /

Posting by hand is easy to skip — and tokens die silently.

Posting the shop’s art to Instagram and Facebook by hand was slow and easy to skip, and Meta’s IG tokens expire every 60 days and lapse silently. An earlier token expired unnoticed and blocked the whole pipeline. It needed to curate a week at a time, respect brand voice, and above all keep its auth alive.

×Manual IG + FB posting was time-consuming and frequently skipped
×IG 60-day tokens expire silently and had already killed the pipeline once
×Curating a coherent week of on-brand posts by hand is slow judgement work

/ what we built /

Treating token lifecycle as a first-class, self-healing component.

01

/social-fill weekly command

A headless weekly job that crawls the live Etsy shop, curates 7 posts, writes British brand-voice captions to the queue, and posts a Discord digest.

paused
02

Google Queue sheet

The central schedule the command writes to and the n8n workflow reads due rows from and marks posted.

03

n8n workflow (UNPSocialAuto001)

A ~42-node workflow polling every 15 min; branches reels vs images, posts to IG and FB, marks rows posted.

inactive
04

Meta token handling

A non-expiring FB System-User page token plus an IG 60-day token minted via a browser flow.

05

IG token auto-refresh cron

A 21-day cron that extends the IG token 60 days and re-imports it, exiting non-zero if the token is dead so a lapse is caught.

How it runs

1

The weekly command crawls the live Etsy shop and builds a candidate pool

2

It curates 7 posts, writes captions, and appends them to the Queue sheet

3

A Discord digest is posted for at-a-glance visibility

4

n8n polls every 15 min, reads due rows and stages media

5

Each post publishes to Instagram and Facebook and the row is marked posted

A 21-day cron auto-refreshes the IG token so Meta auth never silently expires

/ the moment it clicks /

An earlier IG token expired unnoticed and blocked the entire pipeline — which is exactly why an automatic 21-day token-refresh cron was built to catch and prevent silent auth death before it can happen again.

/ tech stack /

Built to be owned.

n8n Meta Graph API Instagram Graph API Facebook Pages API Google Sheets Cloudflare R2 Python CC cron

Skills shown

n8n Meta Graph API IG/FB auto-posting OAuth token lifecycle Google Sheets

/ the takeaway /

Automating the posting is the easy half; the durable win is treating OAuth token lifecycle as a first-class, self-healing component so the pipeline can’t silently die.

Proof: The n8n workflow export plus the token tooling — an auto-refresh script and a browser-flow token minter.

/ next case study / UnicoreLabsPLR Sales
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/ your turn /

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