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Newsletter issues

From issue 30, the newsletter is one issue a day, with an article for each piece of that day’s work worth reporting. The charts and diagrams follow Newsletter visuals.

The shape

Section titled “The shape”
  • One page per day: site/src/content/docs/newsletter/issue-NN.md, with NN continuing the count. The feed makes one item per issue file, so Buttondown makes one draft a day.
  • The title is the day and the day’s articles in a line, for example “25 October: a crash test, a lab for tests with proven answers, and our Colab cards measured”.
  • highlights in the front matter has one line per article. The landing page shows them.
  • The page opens with a sentence or two, then an “In this issue” list linking to each article’s anchor.
  • Each article is an H2, with its own sections as H3 and its own charts. Chart files are named issue-NN-<article>-<name>.svg.
  • Size: scripts/check_feed.py fails an issue whose feed HTML is over 90,000 bytes, because Gmail clips an email at about 102 KB. A day with more than that splits its least urgent article into the next day’s issue.

The day

Section titled “The day”
  • Cut-off: 18:00 UTC. Work after it goes into the next day’s issue.
  • Gathering:
    • the Book Keeper: receipts, the units ledger and run records;
    • R&D: results and verdicts;
    • the Publisher: merged PRs, releases, and which security pieces are released and cleared;
    • the Editor: the review replies, then writes.
  • By 19:30 UTC: one draft, to the Publisher and to Antigravity, in one ticket that covers every article’s technical claims and the visuals.
  • Then: fixes, the Publisher’s read, and the Director’s word. No email goes out without it.
  • After it’s live: .github/workflows/newsletter-publish.yml mirrors the published issues to the Hugging Face dataset mcp-tool-shop/rnd-newsletter, to npm as @rnd-news/newsletter and to PyPI as mcptoolshop-rnd-newsletter once the Pages deploy succeeds. It reads only issue-*.md files on main with an issue number and no draft: true. The npm and PyPI version is 1.<latest issue>.<revision>; a correction to a published issue bumps the revision.
  • A quiet day gets no issue. If one is skipped, the next issue’s opening says so.

Rules for every article

Section titled “Rules for every article”
  • A security finding appears only after its fix is merged and released, and never with exploit detail.
  • Parked work isn’t presented as active.
  • Public text says “mcp-tool-shop”.
  • No quotes from anyone in the studio.
  • Every figure is recounted from its source file, and the data is shown as a chart where a chart helps.
  • The day’s desk brief gives each article a list of what it must not claim.