Mental BoundMental Bound
EL
Publishing & Media

Solarpunk Journal — AI-augmented personal publishing

Field notes on solar, ecology, food and technology, written by Mental Bound's founder, George Tsimpilis, and augmented by AI. We built the journal as a static Astro site: Markdown goes in, plain HTML and an RSS feed come out, with no database and no UI framework.

AI (Artificial Intelligence)WorkflowSEO (Search Engine Optimization)UI (User Interface)
Software DevelopmentAI & AutomationIntelligent Web Experiences
Visit website
solarpunk.gr
The Solarpunk Journal homepage: the bottom of the film still, the masthead “Notes on building a future we'd aspire to evolve in.” and the latest essay
The homepage on a phone: film still, masthead and introduction
The homepage: the film above the masthead, then the latest essay.

At a glance

UI frameworks
0
Static HTML, hand-written CSS and a few lines of inline script
AI-generated scenes
8
The homepage film, dawn to night. It plays once and rests on the night frame
preset topics
7
A topic page appears as soon as a post is filed under it
subscription
RSS
An open feed, with no email list and no trackers

What we built

Writing and reading

solarpunk.gr
  • Posts are Markdown files. A schema checks each post's frontmatter at build time, and a bad field stops the build.
  • One category per post. Topic pages and their counts come from the posts, so there is no list to keep in sync.
  • A reading view with a progress bar, an on-this-page contents list, copy-link and share-to-X, an author card and related posts.
  • Every byline and every post listing names the author with the qualifier “augmented by AI”.
  • A homepage film of eight AI-generated scenes, dawn to night. It plays once, without sound, and stays still for readers who ask for reduced motion.
  • Reading time worked out from each post; drafts never reach production.

Publishing and discovery

  • An RSS feed with author and language. Subscribing needs no account and no email address.
  • Canonical URLs, a sitemap, and Open Graph and X cards on every page, with a default card when a post has no image.
  • Structured data: BlogPosting and breadcrumbs on posts, WebSite on the homepage.
  • An llms.txt index generated at build time, and a robots.txt that points to it.
  • Self-hosted fonts, a same-origin content security policy and strict security headers.
  • A skip link and semantic landmarks; muted text lifted above the WCAG contrast minimum.

From draft to reader

  1. Markdown

    Write

    The author writes the post in Markdown, with AI as a writing aid. The byline says so.

  2. Astro

    Build

    A schema checks the frontmatter, reading time is worked out, and the post joins its topic page.

  3. Vercel

    Deploy

    A push to main publishes the static pages, the RSS feed, the sitemap and llms.txt.

  4. Site, feed, crawlers

    Read

    Readers find it on the site or in their feed reader; search engines and AI crawlers read the sitemap and llms.txt.

Screens

solarpunk.gr/blog/one-robot-each/
The post “One Robot Each”: breadcrumb, title, summary, the byline “George Tsimpilis · augmented by AI”, date, reading time and the hero still
A post: breadcrumb, byline with “augmented by AI”, date, reading time and hero still.
solarpunk.gr/blog/
The Writing index: topic links and numbered rows with title, summary, category, tags, date and reading time
The Writing index, newest first, with topic, tags, date and reading time.
A post on a phone: breadcrumb, title, byline, date, reading time and hero still
A post on a phone.
Eight frames from the homepage film, one per scene, from a harbour at dawn to a city under the stars
The homepage film: eight AI-generated scenes, dawn to night. It plays once and stops on the night.

Built with

  • Astro
  • TypeScript
  • Markdown
  • CSS
  • Vercel

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