Mercury Local
Coverage (20 articles)
Why The Charlotte Mercury Changed Its Type
We Built Our Own, No. 20. The Charlotte Mercury got new type on October 9, chosen for reading rather than looks. The research says no font fits everyone, so the size is now the reader's to set.
Mercury Local Government Pages Now Fill Themselves In
We Built Our Own, No. 19. If somebody has to remember to update a page, it's going to go stale. So we stopped typing the page.
Mercury Local Moves 203 Stories With No Broken Links
We Built Our Own, No. 18. We renamed a section "Town Hall" and readers landed on a federal sentencing. Fixing it meant moving 203 stories without breaking a link.
Mercury Local Makes 133 Plain-Language Fixes in One Pass
We Built Our Own, No. 17. 133 plain-language fixes across three sites, made once, from one place.
Why We Built Our Own Publishing Platform
We Built Our Own, No. 16. A publication as a source, not a destination.
What AI Built for Mercury Local, and What It Got Wrong
We Built Our Own, No. 15. What I decided, what the machine built, what it got wrong.
One Codebase Runs Sixteen Publications
We Built Our Own, No. 14. A new publication is a row in a table and a DNS record.
One Database for Every Mercury Local Publication
We Built Our Own, No. 13. Every article, page, person, transcript and image, in one place.
Mercury Local Database Rules That Refuse Duplicates
We Built Our Own, No. 12. Rules that fire whether or not anyone remembers.
Mercury Local Off-Site Backups and a Restore Drill
We Built Our Own, No. 11. 11,357 objects mirrored off-site, and a restore drill that matched every hash.
Nightly Health Checks for Mercury Local Sites
We Built Our Own, No. 10. Dozens of watchdogs. The first run found six problems nobody knew about.
Mercury Local Page Speed: 542 Milliseconds to 208
We Built Our Own, No. 09. 542 milliseconds to 208. Measure before you optimize.
Mercury Local's Knowledge Graph of Local Profiles
We Built Our Own, No. 08. Thousands of public profiles, built from the coverage.
Sourced Claims Behind Every Mercury Local Article
We Built Our Own, No. 07. Thousands of sourced claims, one per sentence that needs one.
Self-Hosted Analytics Took Our Sites Down
We Built Our Own, No. 06. We self-hosted our own. Ten days later it took every site down.
Atlas Command, Our Newsroom Desk
We Built Our Own, No. 05. Version two, seven blocks, one day.
One Email Send Path for Every Mercury Local Domain
We Built Our Own, No. 04. One send path for every domain. No tracking sold to anyone.
Why We Deleted Our Media Server
We Built Our Own, No. 03. 1,006 images repointed in one sitting, and why permissions won.
Mercury Local's WordPress Migration in Two Weeks
We Built Our Own, No. 02. 813 articles, 7,124 images, one platform. Built by one publisher and an AI.
Leaving Three WordPress Blogs Behind
We Built Our Own, No. 01. Where Mercury Local started, and why it could not stay there.