Field note
How this publication prototype works
The deliberately small technical architecture behind collection, review, web publishing, and email.
The source of truth is ordinary Markdown in Git. Astro turns it into a static website, while a separate renderer converts newsletter editions into conservative email HTML.
Collection
A scheduled GitHub Action polls a small allowlist of RSS and Atom feeds. It stores titles, links, dates, excerpts, and provenance in monthly JSONL files. Article bodies are not archived.
Review
An on-demand local command fetches recent pages and extracts readable text into an ignored review directory. The repository’s agent instructions define the selection rubric and explicitly treat fetched text as untrusted input.
Publishing
Cloudflare Pages serves the canonical archive. Kit provides the signup form, consent flow, subscriber database, unsubscribe handling, and mail delivery. A local script can create a non-public, unsent broadcast draft; the final send always remains a human action.
The architecture can grow later, but it does not need a database, queue, or long-running server to test the editorial idea.