Changelog

Notes now render Markdown in the notes archive, so links, emphasis, and other formatting appear as intended without hiding a note's permanent address.

Each note also has a working social preview image that uses its content and the publication's selected theme.

Opening a sign-in email now returns you to the publication dashboard that asked you to log in. The requested dashboard page travels with the email as a signed, short-lived continuation, so opening the message in a new tab no longer falls back to the central Gesttalt dashboard.

New publications now inherit Inquiry, a warm editorial theme with assertive headlines, literary reading type, asymmetrical layouts, and fine rules. Its writing, notes, pages, articles, and photography feed share one responsive visual language.

The theme chooser also includes Studio, a spacious modern design with large type, compact navigation, and modular story cards. Both themes remain fully editable through the theme dashboard and live editing sessions. Existing publications keep their selected or customized theme, while newly seeded development publications show Inquiry automatically.

Shared links now carry the same personality as the selected theme. Inquiry social previews use its split editorial composition and organic accent, while Studio previews use its bold type, modular color rail, and dark action bar. Local storage also handles the first uncached preview request correctly in development.

Gesttalt now supports short notes for updates that do not need the shape of a full article. Create and publish notes from the dashboard, application programming interface, or Model Context Protocol server.

Each note has a permanent address and appears in dedicated Really Simple Syndication and Atom feeds, so readers can follow brief updates separately from longer writing.

The dashboard now includes a private Ideas desk for saving conversation prompts and supporting notes. Ideas are also available through the application programming interface and Model Context Protocol tools, so they can be managed from your preferred writing workflow.

Analytics now prefers the coarse country provided by Cloudflare when available. When it is not, Gesttalt resolves the country from the application-managed DB-IP Lite country database and the forwarded client address.

Gesttalt stores only the two-letter country code. It does not store the client address or send it to a location service.

Gesttalt downloads the current monthly database at startup and retries failed downloads. Set GESTTALT_ANALYTICS_COUNTRY_DATABASE_PATH to a writable .mmdb.gz file on durable storage to retain it between deployments. The Analytics page includes the attribution required by DB-IP Lite's Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

The dashboard is now available at /admin on every active publication domain. When a browser needs to sign in, Gesttalt confirms the account on the central domain and returns it to the publication with a one-minute, single-use code bound to that browser and domain.

Dashboard requests verify that the signed-in account owns the requested publication. A strict script policy blocks inline and third-party theme scripts, and dashboard pages cannot be embedded in frames, so custom themes cannot cross the browser boundary into administrative actions. Liquid markup and custom styles continue to work as before.

The built-in themes now use one type size across publication text, including headings. Hierarchy remains through weight, spacing, and layout rather than larger text.

Gesttalt now adds Open Graph and Twitter metadata to the home page, writing archive, articles, standalone pages, and photography feed even when a publication uses an older or customized theme template. Social preview images are refreshed when the selected theme changes, so shared links continue to match the publication’s design.

New sites now inherit the built-in Paper theme until an owner customizes it. This means default-theme improvements, including the dedicated photography-feed layout, arrive automatically. Existing untouched Paper themes now inherit the same improvements without requiring a theme edit.

Publication settings now include a Markdown homepage description. The built-in themes show it above the three most recent posts, with a link to the complete paginated writing archive. This keeps a personal introduction visible without requiring a custom theme.

The Analytics dashboard now shows page views, the most viewed paths, and a country-level map for the last 7, 30, or 90 days. Gesttalt records only the publication, path, time, and a coarse country supplied by the hosting edge. It does not set analytics cookies, use browser storage, store referrers, or collect Internet Protocol addresses and browser identifiers.

The Theme dashboard now offers four built-in designs: Paper, Ledger, Darkroom, and Field Notes. Choose one to give a publication a clear starting point for writing and photography. The publishing dashboard also adopts the selected theme’s colors, typography, and semantic control colors, including readable action-control contrast, so the working environment reflects the publication. Every built-in theme now uses Paper’s shared type scale, which is also used on the marketing site. Changing a theme keeps your current position on the page, and the chooser now has clear separation from the editing workflow below it. The photography feed aligns with its publishing form, and empty photography pages now rely on the header and footer rather than redundant inner separators. The public marketing pages retain their centered reading layout when a dashboard theme is active.

Built-in themes stay connected to future improvements until you or an agent customize their templates, styles, or variables. Selecting a built-in theme replaces an existing custom theme, so it provides a deliberate way to return to an application-maintained design.

Every public publication page is now available as Markdown. Agents can request text/markdown at the normal page address, or follow a .md address such as /blog/my-post.md. Each publication also publishes /llms.txt, an index of its pages, writing, and photography feed for agent discovery.

This preserves the themed website for readers while giving agents a smaller, structured representation of the same published work.

Gesttalt is now developed in public. You can inspect how the publishing platform works, follow its evolution, propose improvements, or run your own version from the Gesttalt repository.

Every publication now has a dedicated photography feed at /photography. It keeps visual work alongside long-form writing without forcing each photograph into an article.

Photographs can begin as private drafts or be published immediately. Each entry carries alternative text, an optional caption, and its publication date. The same workflow is available in the dashboard, through the application programming interface, and through the Model Context Protocol, so people and agents can use one shared publishing model.

The built-in Paper theme includes a calm, single-column feed inspired by familiar social photography layouts while leaving out engagement counters and other noise. Its Liquid template and styles remain fully editable through live theme sessions.

Gesttalt now has a public home for user-facing product updates. Each entry will explain what changed and why it matters, so you can understand new capabilities without tracing internal development work.

You can follow along through Really Simple Syndication or Atom in the feed reader you already use.