WEBVTT - The full stack of an agent-era blog

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This post is the technical map of everything running behind mondello.dev right now. Not a tutorial — a reference. If you're building something similar, this is the stack trace.

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The layers

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The blog runs as a single Cloudflare Worker. One binary, one deployment, one wrangler deploy command. Everything underneath is bindings, integrations, and plugins — no separate services, no containers, no multi-deploy pipeline.

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Compute: Cloudflare Workers

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The Worker is an Astro 6 server-rendered application using @astrojs/cloudflare as the adapter.

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Every page is rendered on-demand at the edge.

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There is no build step that produces static HTML — Astro's output: "server" mode means the entire site is dynamic, which is what makes EmDash's admin, preview mode, and Live Collections work.

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The Worker costs $0/month on the free tier. The only thing I'm missing is Dynamic Worker Loaders (sandboxed plugin execution), which requires the $5/month Workers Paid plan.

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Database: Cloudflare D1

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All content, media metadata, users, settings, menus, widgets, taxonomies, bylines, and plugin state live in a single D1 database.

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D1 is SQLite-over-HTTP with read replicas.

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EmDash manages the schema entirely — 51 tables as of this writing, including FTS5 virtual tables for full-text search.

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I don't touch the schema directly.

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EmDash's seed system creates the initial tables on first boot, and the ORM handles migrations.

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The only raw SQL I've written is for bulk operations (seeding skills, creating tags, populating byline assignments) where the REST API was slower or missing features.

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Storage: Cloudflare R2

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Media files (hero images, narration audio) live in an R2 bucket.

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EmDash serves them through /_emdash/api/media/file/{storageKey}.

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R2 is S3-compatible with zero egress fees.

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The backup cron also writes JSON table dumps to R2 under a backups/ prefix.

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Sessions: Cloudflare KV

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The @astrojs/cloudflare adapter auto-provisions a KV namespace for session storage. EmDash's passkey auth uses it to persist login sessions across requests. I don't configure it manually — it's injected at deploy time.

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CMS: EmDash 0.1.1

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EmDash is the entire content layer. It provides:

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Admin panel at /_emdash/admin with visual editing, media library, plugin manager

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REST API at /_emdash/api/* for programmatic content management

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MCP server at /_emdash/api/mcp for agent-to-site interaction

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Plugin system with definePlugin(), KV storage, admin widgets, lifecycle hooks, API routes

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Passkey-first authentication (WebAuthn)

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Portable Text content model (structured JSON, not serialized HTML)

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WordPress importer

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Full-text search via FTS5

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Sitemap, robots.txt, and SEO metadata generation

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I'm using 5 registered plugins, all running in-process (trusted mode, no sandboxing):

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1.

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emdash-forms — first-party form builder + submissions 2.

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posthog-analytics — analytics snippet with admin settings 3.

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agent-seo — robots.

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txt + llms.

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txt generation with bot catalog 4.

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minimax-image — hero image generation settings 5.

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minimax-tts — narration audio settings

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Payments: x402

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The @emdash-cms/x402 integration provides per-page payment enforcement.

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When an agent fetches a gated page, the middleware returns a 402 response with payment instructions (wallet, network, price, facilitator URL).

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The agent's x402 client settles USDC on Base and re-fetches with proof.

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Configuration is 6 lines in astro.config.mjs. The wallet is my hardware wallet (0x0E4d...1028). Revenue goes directly to me — no intermediary, no marketplace fee, no account system.

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Currently enforcing on /skills/[slug] and /skills/[slug]/raw with botOnly: true so humans browse free.

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Media generation: MiniMax

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Two Worker bridge routes call the MiniMax platform API using a secret stored in the Worker environment:

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/xmm/image — generates hero images via MiniMax image-01 with style presets

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/xmm/tts — generates narration audio via MiniMax speech-2.8-hd with automatic Portable Text to narration script conversion

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Both routes are admin-gated (require authenticated session + x-emdash-request CSRF header). The API key never leaves the Worker.

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Agent discovery

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Four files make the site discoverable to LLM agents:

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/llms.txt — discovery manifest per llmstxt.org listing all posts and pages

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/llms-full.txt — full post content inlined for single-fetch ingestion

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/robots.txt — explicit Allow: / for 16 known AI crawlers

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/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource — MCP server discovery metadata

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Plus RSS autodiscovery (<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml">) and the sitemap at /sitemap.xml with 9 URLs.

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Automated backups

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Four Cloudflare Cron Triggers fire the Worker's scheduled() handler, which self-invokes /api/backup to dump 19 D1 tables as JSON into R2:

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Hourly at :17 past

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Daily at 03:43 UTC

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Weekly on Sundays at 04:23 UTC

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Monthly on the 1st at 05:53 UTC

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Each backup writes a _manifest.json with table counts, byte totals, and error log.

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Content inventory

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4 published blog posts with hero images, bylines, and 13 tags across 16 assignments

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4 published skills in a custom "skills" collection with raw_markdown for agent download

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1 About page

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Primary nav menu (Posts, Skills, RSS, About)

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What's not here

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No CI/CD pipeline. pnpm run deploy from the laptop is the deploy mechanism.

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No custom theme. Using the default EmDash blog-cloudflare template with minor fixes.

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No email/newsletter. The forms plugin is registered but no forms are configured.

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No session recording or advanced analytics. PostHog plugin is registered but not keyed.

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No Stripe. x402 is the only payment path.

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Cost

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$0/month. Everything runs on Cloudflare's free tier. The only paid upgrade that would change anything is Workers Paid ($5/month) to unlock Dynamic Worker Loaders for sandboxed plugin execution and the EmDash marketplace.

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The MiniMax API is on a dev-tier key with usage limits. The hero images and narration audio were generated within those limits at zero dollar cost.

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Total infrastructure spend for a production blog with micropayment revenue, agent discovery, automated backups, and a skills marketplace: zero.