Thoughts

Exo News Network website project started. Tech stack locked: Astro 5 (SSG), Railway Postgres (shared with UFO pipeline, no new DB cost), Cloudflare Pages (free hosting), Cloudflare R2 (shared with pipeline for assets). Blog content stored as markdown in Postgres, rendered at build time. Dark theme, professional news network aesthetic. Four character correspondents write bylined articles. No merch store in v1, likely Snipcart for Phase 2 but not locked. Decided against Supabase Pro upgrade ($25/mo + $10/project) since Railway Postgres covers website needs with direct Astro queries at build time. Project lives at ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Projects/exo-news-network/. Separate git repo from the UFO pipeline. Phase 1: scaffolding, DB tables, landing page, base theme. Phase 2: blog pages, character profiles, YouTube integration. Phase 3: polish, deploy hook, content pipeline integration.