Two things set the rhythm, and neither is a row counter — that beats like a metronome. It comes due on a count of *cards*: a block is a set of stories and a hero is one story however many cells it takes, so a stretch thick with big footprints reaches the count over more rows than a stretch of squares does, and block heights end up tracking the size mix (measured: four to five rows through square-heavy runs, six to seven where art clusters). And the break *makes* its own section front rather than waiting for one, promoting the card that opens a new block to a hero. Waiting was the first attempt and it failed on the numbers — a banner lands at the start of a row on its own two to five times in thirty-six, so the preference almost never fired and a max-rows cap did all the work. Promotion always fits, since a break only falls on a row with all four cells free. A tail guard keeps the last cut from leaving a rule with a fragment under it.
The break sits between two grids rather than inside one: a grid item would be stretched to the 9rem row track, and out here its height is its own, down to nothing. Three custom properties are the whole contract a theme writes against — the air around it, the rule through it, an optional glyph centred on that rule — with `none` on the last two meaning the real absence of each, so a theme can remove the separation entirely rather than leave an empty band. Themes wanting something a rule can't be reach past the properties to plain CSS: nyt pairs hairlines in the grid's own pen and clips them to the art inset (which moves up to the feed, since a property on the grid can't reach a sibling); brutalist spends air around the 2px border it already divides everything else with; kanagawa takes a comment divider, geocities the rainbow its header ends on, melange a thinner band of the mélange. The page gutter moves to a feed wrapper so every block lines up on the same edges, and nyt's masking frame now runs once per block, which is what makes each of them read frameless and not just the feed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Thumbnails were failing in two different ways that both ended as an empty box.
Cloudflare hotlink protection answers a cross-site Referer with 403, so images
we had extracted correctly (dles.aukspot.com's og:image among them) never
rendered — every onError handler set display:none and swallowed it. The new
Thumbnail component loads with referrerPolicy="no-referrer", retries once
through /api/proxy-image for hosts that reject an empty referrer too, and only
then falls back to a placeholder.
Separately, the extraction cascade ended at the page's icon and then a guessed
/favicon.ico, so thumbnailUrl was almost never empty — just a 16x16 icon
cover-cropped into a 128x72 box. It now stops at real artwork, with faviconUrl
and accentColor (theme-color / msapplication-TileColor / mask-icon) as their own
fields. An absent thumbnailUrl finally means "no artwork", which is what makes
the placeholder possible: the site's own color mixed into the theme surface,
with its favicon centered on it, or its initial. Contrast holds for any
third-party color by construction rather than by luminance math, so nyt only
has to set --thumb-tint-strength to 0% to stay monochrome and geocities only
has to raise it. Missing accents fall back to a stable hostname-derived hue, so
rows saved before this get a tint with no backfill.
Migration 0011 reclassifies favicon-shaped thumbnailUrls on existing dumps.
The journal mosaic keeps its pull-quote and text fallbacks — the placeholder
appears there only to repair a broken image.
Also fixed: refresh silently overwrote good metadata with a failure stub, the
refresh button swallowed every error, refresh never broadcast the update,
extractBestIcon ranked SVG icons below 16x16 PNGs, and shared links with no
artwork carried no og:image at all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
