Naija Chronoscope

The problem

Naija Chronoscope started as a vanilla HTML/CSS/JS blog about Nigerian history, culture and news. It needed to become a real publishing platform: an editorial workflow, searchable archives, media handling and a newsletter, all maintained by one person.

What I built

• Custom article editor. A single-textarea Write/Preview editor with a slash-command picker, table blocks and a floating media tray. AI-assisted formatting is built into the editor flow.
• Media library. Admins can search and reuse previously uploaded Cloudinary media instead of re-uploading it.
• Full-text search. Postgres tsvector with a stored generated column and a GIN index, exposed through a debounced live-search dropdown.
• Research pipeline. A daily Vercel cron ingests items from RSS feeds and stores them under a separate research status, outside the publishing flow.
• Newsletter and feeds. Weekly subscriber broadcasts through Resend batches, plus global and per-category RSS feeds.
• Auth and SEO. Edge middleware protecting /admin/*, user-enumeration-safe login flows, generated metadata, a sitemap and Search Console submission.

Technical decisions

Signed Cloudinary uploads. Large video uploads were failing with a 413 when they passed through the app server. Moving to a signed direct-to-Cloudinary upload removed the file from the request path entirely.

Many-to-many media. A single article_id column on the media table couldn't express reuse, so I migrated to an article_media join table: backfilled it, verified it, then dropped the old column.

Rehydrating draft media by URL. Client-side media ids regenerate every session, so matching by id broke drafts. I match on the media URL, which is durable, then rewrite the article's media markers to the fresh ids.

Result

[PLACEHOLDER: a real measurement, e.g. articles published, monthly readers, or an honest "launched, growing". Do not invent a number.]

What I'd do next

[PLACEHOLDER: your real next steps. Draft candidates: an admin trash view with scheduled purging, and advertising once readership justifies it.]