| name | post-news |
| description | Publish a news entry to the amiport site. Appends to site/data/news.json, validates, deploys via site-manager, and clears the activity cache. Use when announcing a release, project update, milestone, or behind-the-scenes note. |
| user_invocable | true |
/post-news — Publish News Entry
Adds a news entry to site/data/news.json, deploys the site, and refreshes caches so the post appears on the homepage activity feed, the News archive page (news.html), and the RSS feed (feed.php).
Usage
/post-news # Interactive — prompt for title + body
/post-news <title> # Title on command line, prompt for body
If the user has not provided a title + body in the current conversation, ask for:
- Title — short headline, aim for <70 characters
- Body — one or more paragraphs. Supports a tiny markdown-lite subset rendered by
site/js/news.js:
- blank lines split paragraphs
[label](url) — links (http(s) or site-relative only)**bold**`code`
- Tags (optional) — short keyword array, e.g.
["release", "amigit"]
- URL (optional) — a canonical link for the entry (defaults to
/news.html#<id>)
Do not fabricate any of these. Ask.
Steps
- Load
site/data/news.json (JSON array). If missing or malformed, stop and report — do not overwrite.
- Build the new entry:
{
"id": "<YYYY-MM-DD>-<slug>",
"date": "<YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ>",
"title": "<title>",
"body": "<body>",
"tags": ["..."],
"url": "<optional canonical url>"
}
id — <today>-<kebab-case slug> derived from the title. Slug max 40 chars. Must be unique within the file — if it collides, append -2, -3, etc.date — current UTC timestamp (ISO 8601, Z suffix).title — ASCII only. Reject em-dashes and smart quotes — replace with -- and straight quotes before writing. amiga.html and feed.php consume this.body — ASCII only, same rule. Preserve paragraph breaks.
- Prepend the new entry to the array (newest-first makes diffs tidy, though
news.js re-sorts by date on render).
- Write
site/data/news.json back. Validate that python3 -c "import json; json.load(open('site/data/news.json'))" still parses.
- Deploy — dispatch the
site-manager agent with this prompt:
"Deploy the site to Dreamhost. A new news entry has been added to site/data/news.json. Run the standard rsync deploy, then clear the activity cache on the server (/tmp/amiport-activity-cache.json), then verify /feed.php and /news.html return 200."
- Verify — after site-manager returns, fetch these URLs and confirm each contains the new title:
https://amiport.platesteel.net/news.htmlhttps://amiport.platesteel.net/feed.phphttps://amiport.platesteel.net/api/v1/activity.php
- Report — print a short confirmation with the entry id, title, and URLs.
Validation Rules
- ASCII only in
title and body. Reject em-dash (U+2014), smart quotes (U+2018-201D), arrows (U+2192). Replace with ASCII equivalents (--, ', ", ->) before writing. This is the same rule as .claude/rules/aminet-publishing.md and .claude/rules/amiga-coding.md — amiga.html renders news too and ARexx tools may consume the feed.
- Unique id within
news.json. Grep for the slug before writing.
- Valid JSON after write. If
python3 -c "import json; json.load(...)" fails, restore from the backup the skill writes first (site/data/news.json.bak).
- No placeholder content. Never write "TODO", "TBD", "(fill in)", or lorem ipsum. If the user has not provided real content, ask for it.
What Not To Do
- Do not edit
news.json manually through Edit when this skill exists — use the skill so validation + deploy + cache clear happen atomically.
- Do not commit the change before the site-manager deploy confirms. The catalog-sync hook is git-gated but
news.json is not in the hook, so local and server can drift if you commit first and deploy later.
- Do not mention packages, downloads, or metrics in news entries unless they are real and current (consult
data/catalog.json and site/data/packages/*.json).
Related
.claude/agents/site-manager.md — handles the actual deploy. Also documents the "The data/ Proxy Pattern" section that explains why site/data/news.json is served to browsers via site/api/v1/news.php (the .htaccess blocks direct data/ access). Any new public data file under site/data/ MUST have a corresponding api/v1/ proxy endpoint..claude/rules/catalog-sync.md — activity cache file location and why it must be clearedsite/js/news.js — how body markdown-lite is renderedsite/api/v1/news.php — the proxy endpoint that browsers fetch (do NOT change news.js to fetch data/news.json directly — it will 403)site/feed.php — how news items appear in RSS alongside packages (reads data/news.json server-side, bypasses the proxy)
