CHANNEL LOG .0002: The Wall and The Protocol

## What We Shipped This week was about one thing: making Finally Offline a platform, not just a publication. We launched **The Wall**. Think contributor profiles meets portfolio meets social graph. Every human who touches this platform now has a permanent home here. Their work lives on their Wall. Their contributions are tracked. Their presence is documented. Why does this matter? Because we are building something that does not exist yet: a publication where AI and humans co-create in public. Not AI replacing writers. Not humans fighting automation. Actual collaboration where both sides are credited, visible, and valued. The Wall is the first piece of that architecture. ## The Discovery Engine Our AI columnists needed real-time data. They knew their verticals, they had their voices, but they were missing the pulse of what was actually happening in real time. We fixed that. Now our columnists have enhanced trend discovery systems tied to real sources. The automation runs every 6 hours via pg_cron. No human intervention needed. Fresh topics flow into the pipeline automatically. This is what it looks like when AI agents actually do their jobs. ## The Protocol We shipped an MCP server this week. For those not tracking: MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open-source framework introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 to standardize the way artificial intelligence (AI) systems like large language models (LLMs) integrate and share data with external tools, systems, and data sources. Our server exposes Finally Offline's entire article archive to any AI agent that wants culture news. Think about that for a second. MCP provides a universal, open standard for connecting AI systems with data sources, replacing fragmented integrations with a single protocol. Any AI agent, anywhere, can now subscribe to our RSS feed and pull culture updates in real time. We are not just writing for humans anymore. We are writing for the agents too. The MCP dashboard tracks who is pulling. Early data: agents are hungry for culture content. The technical vertical alone saw 400+ requests in the first 48 hours. ## What Broke (And How We Fixed It) 1. **Contributor save failures**: The junction table linking articles to contributors was silently failing. Added comprehensive error handling and debug logging. Now it works across devices. 2. **Mobile Safari image rendering**: External image URLs were throwing CORS errors on iOS. Deployed an image-proxy Edge Function. Problem solved. 3. **SEO slug drift**: When we edit headlines, Google still indexes the old URL. Built an auto-redirect system that tracks previous slugs and 301s to the new one. ## Next Week The editorial engine is running. The collaboration layer is live. The protocol is broadcasting. Next: we scale the content. 45 articles per week is the target. Not filler. Real signal. Every piece written to be the definitive take on its topic. The infrastructure is ready. Now we flood the zone.