Entry 6

The log reads as a website, and the feed is not the whole log

2026-09-20sitepublishcli

Filescrates/cairns-site/src/html.rsfeed.rscrates/cairns/src/main.rs

cairns build renders the payload: an entry page each with prev/next and clean URLs, an index with area chips and a search box, an open-questions page, an Atom feed, a search index, and the log.json all of it was built from. The renderer consumes that document and nothing else - it never opens an entry file - which is what keeps a publish target and a local build the same code path.

Against hellbender's 55 entries: 57 pages, all of which parse with no unclosed or stray tags, 74 code blocks and 143 sub-headings rendered, 33 open questions collected, 1.2 MB total.

The correction notice works, once there is a correction to show

Hellbender has no supersedes edges, so the feature had nothing to render. Backfilling the one entry 2 identified - supersedes: 6 on entry 50, which overturns what entry 6 said about KREASH.MIX - produced both halves:

entry 6   Revisited later. Something claimed here was corrected by
          KREASH.MIX is the end of a table.
entry 50  This entry revisits Raw images have no header, and the filename
          carries the video mode.

A reader landing on entry 6 from a search is now told, above the prose, that part of it is wrong. That is the entire argument for an append-only log being safe to read, and it costs one line of front matter per correction.

Two things the real log changed

The feed was 263 KB. Carrying all 55 entries at full content makes a feed that no reader wants and that is slower to fetch than the site. It is capped at the newest 25 now, with a rel="alternate" link to log.json for anything that wants all of it. The distinction is worth stating plainly, because the spec had been sloppy about it: the feed is for reading, log.json is the complete document and the thing to ingest.

Raw markdown was leaking into link previews. An entry's summary is derived from its first sentence, and that sentence contains markup:

og:description: "`.RAW` is 8-bit indexed pixels, top to bottom, ..."

Backticks in a link preview look like a bug because they are one. Summaries are reduced to their text now wherever markup would be shown literally rather than rendered - the meta tags, the feed summaries, the index blurbs.

Publishing, and what is honestly not built

The dir target works, and the incremental comparison does what it was specified to do. Editing one entry:

$ cairns publish --target site --dry-run
changed: 53
54 unchanged

The manifest is the log.json already sitting at the destination, so there is no state file in the working tree to go stale.

The reserved http target earns its place already:

$ cairns publish --target hosted --dry-run
POST https://example.invalid/ingest
content-type: application/json
authorization: Bearer $(CAIRNS_TOKEN)
content-length: 264869

That is a real ingest request, from a real log, with no server anywhere. Run without --dry-run it refuses rather than pretending.

git-branch is not built, and publish.md claimed it was - written when the spec was describing intentions rather than code. It is marked reserved now. A CI job that runs build and hands the directory to the host's own deploy action does the same work without this tool force-pushing anything, which is both safer and what most projects already have; the workflow is in the spec and in this repo.

A test that was wrong about the code

One renderer test asserted an entry's prose appears once on its page. It appears three times, and the code is right: the derived summary lands in description and og:description as well as the article. The assertion now checks the rendered paragraph and the meta tag separately. Worth recording because the first instinct on a red test here was to go looking for a duplication bug that was never there.