Two upgrades to make the digest actually readable:
1) Article-grounded 2-3 sentence summaries (everywhere)
The old prompt got just the title + miniflux's content excerpt,
which for HN/Lobsters/wire feeds is barely more than the title
itself — so summaries paraphrased the title and added nothing.
Now every URL gets fetched and main-content-extracted via
trafilatura on a parallel pre-pass (10 workers, ~15s for ~50
URLs). Extracted text caches to /output/.article-cache.json with
a 7-day TTL so repeat runs in the same window don't re-pull.
Headlines also get summarized now — one batched LLM call per
category (world / local). Rendered as a paragraph below the
title with source + time on the right rail.
Prompt rewrites tell the model to pull names/numbers/places
from the body and explicitly forbid restating the title.
Result: real specifics ("71% saw no pay increase globally",
"third time in less than two weeks", "Islamabad and Moscow
intermediaries") instead of title paraphrase.
2) Per-desk collapse buttons
Chevron next to .desk-count toggles a .is-collapsed class.
Collapsed state is per-device (localStorage by section id) since
collapse is a viewing preference, not content state.
Browsers were serving stale frontend assets after rebuilds, which hid
the new world/local headline desks: the OLD app.js's refreshCounts()
only counted .item children (not .headline), so the new headline desks
came up with visibleItems=0 and got the .is-empty class which is
display:none. Hard refresh fixed it but only for the user who knew
to do that.
Append ?v=<generated_at strftime> to both link/script tags in
digest.html.j2 and archive.html.j2 so every digest run produces a new
asset URL. Works with the existing entrypoint.sh static-asset sync —
no other infra needed.
Two new dense headline rails above the existing reddit/tech cards.
Designed for high-volume "what happened" coverage where the title
is the deliverable — no LLM summarization, ~15 items per section,
6-column-collapsing grid (title / source / time).
Digest pipeline:
* fetch_miniflux_headlines(category) — flat list per category, dedup
by lowercased title (different feeds syndicate the same wire stories)
* 8h look-back window (vs 12h for tech/reddit) since headlines move
faster
* cap of 15 per section (DIGEST_MINIFLUX_HEADLINES_MAX)
Frontend:
* .headline element parallels .item for the hide-button machinery
(both have data-id, both honored by app.js)
* dense 3-col layout collapses to 1-col on narrow screens
* jumpnav now numbers world=01, local=02, reddit=03, tech=04
Setup:
* seed-headlines.py — one-shot script (lives in the image at
/app/seed-headlines.py). Creates the World + Local categories in
miniflux, subscribes a curated feed list, and renames each feed
to a short display title (BBC vs "BBC News", "LA Times" vs "California").
Idempotent — reruns only add new feeds.
* Default world: BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera. Default local: LA Times Local,
LA Times CA, Voice of OC. (OC Register blocks miniflux; left out.)
* entrypoint.sh now syncs templates/{style.css,app.js,favicon.svg}
to /output on container start so frontend asset updates land
without a manual copy after rebuild.
Wrapped .masthead-brand in <a href="index.html"> in both digest.html.j2
and archive.html.j2 so the hero is a clickable shortcut to the latest
edition. Useful when reading an archived edition and you want to jump
back to the freshest one without going through the archive list.
CSS: color: inherit + text-decoration: none keeps the visual
identical; hover drops opacity to 0.85 for affordance; focus-visible
gets an accent outline so keyboard nav is discoverable.
Adds a small × on each item that hides it from the page. State is
server-side at /output/hidden.json so the same hidden set follows
the user across devices (home, ipad, laptop, work). A "Hidden (N)"
tray at the bottom shows what's hidden on the current page with a
restore button per row; older hidden ids that aren't on this page
sit silently and continue to filter future editions that include
the same article.
Architecture change: news-digest-web swaps from nginx:alpine to a
FastAPI app on uvicorn, built from the same Dockerfile as the
worker. Same image, different command (`uvicorn web:app` overrides
the worker's cron entrypoint via compose). Drops one image dependency,
adds /api/{hidden,hide,restore}.
Item ids are stable 12-char sha1 prefixes (`reddit:<post_id>` /
`miniflux:<entry_id>`) computed in digest.py at render time and
emitted as `data-id` on each .item. The frontend reads /api/hidden
once on load, applies `is-hidden` to matching items, and POSTs
hide/restore on user interaction (optimistic, with rollback on
network error).
Storage: single JSON array at /output/hidden.json, atomic writes
via tempfile + rename, threading.Lock around the read-modify-write
inside the single uvicorn worker. No auth — the digest itself is
unauthenticated on LAN; same trust boundary applies.
Playbook also drops the DOCKER_BUILDKIT=0 fallback now that
ana-docker is on docker-ce 29, and adds three verify steps
(/api/hidden returns a JSON array, app.js is reachable, full
hide/restore round-trip with a synthetic id).
Editorial-briefing favicon: 32×32 SVG, Australis palette. Cyan
masthead-rule across the top echoes the page's aurora-rule, four
descending text-line indicators below evoke a newspaper column.
Reads cleanly at 16×16 (the typical browser tab size). Static
markup only — no script, no animation — so all browsers honor
it for tab + bookmark icons.
Linked from both digest.html.j2 and archive.html.j2 with the
proper type="image/svg+xml" attribute. Served by nginx from
the bind-mounted /output dir alongside index.html and style.css.
Deploy playbook also updated to copy the favicon into /output at
deploy-time so a fresh deploy doesn't 404 on the icon before the
first cron fire.
Two requested polish items:
1. Reddit items now show TWO distinct action chips in the footer:
[↗ SOURCE huggingface.co] [⌥ REDDIT THREAD] 3h · u/foo
Previously the external link was a tiny dot-separated text link
that visually competed with the post metadata. Now: explicit
labeled buttons, distinct colors (cyan for source, blue for
thread), with hover states that match the Australis accent
palette. Non-Reddit items get just the SOURCE chip.
2. Archive page at /archive.html — lists every edition-*.html on
disk, newest-first, sorted PM-before-AM within a day. Each row
is the date in editorial serif + an AM/PM chip color-coded
(yellow morning / cyan evening) + a hover-affordance arrow.
Header link from the main edition reads "ARCHIVE →".
Generation: digest.py walks OUTPUT_DIR for the edition-*.html
filename pattern on every run, sorts, renders archive.html.j2,
writes atomically. Cheap (~1ms even with hundreds of editions).
No retention cap — twice-daily for a year is ~700 small files,
well under any reasonable concern.
CSS additions: .action chip styles (with per-action color variants),
.archive-link in masthead, full .archive-row + .archive-edition
treatment.
Three iterations to get end-to-end:
1. Dockerfile missed COPY run-digest.sh — cron's exec target wasn't
in the image, every fire failed. Added COPY + chmod.
2. Jinja template used {{ list|sum(attribute='items') }} which
sum()s lists with start=0 → TypeError int+list. Switched to
computing reddit_total / tech_total in Python and passing as
template args.
3. LLM defaulted to qwen3.5-35-a3b which (a) is broken in
llama-swap (model process exits on launch), (b) when working,
defaults to extended-thinking mode that eats the entire token
budget without producing any visible content. Same pattern with
qwen3.6-35-a3b. Switched default to granite-4-small — small (4B),
fast (~1s/call), no thinking-mode pathology, returns clean JSON.
Whole pipeline now runs in ~35s total across 8 sources.
Also hardened the LLM response parser to fall back to
reasoning_content when content is empty — catches the thinking-mode
case if anyone ever points the digest at one of those models. Plus
the deploy playbook gained DOCKER_BUILDKIT=0 because ana-docker is
on docker 20.10 which doesn't carry the buildx driver versions our
newer client expects ("client version 1.52 is too new"). Real fix is
upgrading docker on the fleet — separate workstream.
The Miniflux inbox got noisy after a few subreddits + HN + Lobste.rs.
This stack distills a single static page twice a day — at 0800 and
2000 local — that surfaces only what cleared score + ratio filters,
each item tldr'd by qwen3.5-35-a3b on llama-swap.
Pipeline (digest.py, ~330 lines):
1. Discover subreddits from Miniflux feeds (any reddit.com/r/<sub>/
URL — single source of truth, no duplicated config).
2. Reddit JSON top-of-day per sub. Filter: score >= 50,
upvote_ratio >= 0.85. Cap 8 items per sub.
3. Miniflux /v1/entries for the 'Tech aggregators' category
(HN, Lobste.rs) — last 12 hours.
4. Batched per-source summarization via llama-swap
/v1/chat/completions. Each post gets a one-sentence tldr +
one-word tag (news / tutorial / release / discussion /
question / showcase / drama / meme).
5. Render Jinja2 template. Atomic write to /output/index.html
(.tmp + rename) so partial pages never get served. Per-edition
archive at /output/edition-YYYY-MM-DD-{am,pm}.html.
Two containers:
news-digest-worker python:3.12-alpine + busybox crond
news-digest-web nginx:alpine, port 8181, homepage card via
docker labels (group=News, fits next to Miniflux)
Both bind-mount /opt/docker/data/news-digest as /output and
/usr/share/nginx/html respectively.
Aesthetic — operations-center chrome (Australis cool-mono palette,
JetBrains Mono UPPERCASE eyebrows, mdi-glyph anchor) wrapping
editorial-serif news content (Fraunces variable serif w/ optical
sizes). Two type families that wouldn't normally meet, intentionally
combined: chrome says 'filed at 0800 from the bridge'; headlines say
'this is news, read it like news.' Sticky aurora-glow rule under the
masthead is the only sanctioned Australis gradient.
Edition stamp (AM/PM in big mono Australis-yellow) is the signature
piece — establishes the twice-daily rhythm at a glance.
All filtering + LLM + scheduling knobs in .env. Subreddit list is
implicit (read from Miniflux), so adding a sub = subscribing in
Miniflux, no config edit on this stack.
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