gob.co.nz is a public corrections register for the tech industry — a fe de erratas that documents revised positions, failed predictions, unfulfilled promises, and dissolved consensus. Each entry is a citable URL someone sends in a conversation. The aesthetic is deliberately institutional: a government gazette that happens to be on the web.

Stack decisions

The constraints were clear from the start: zero client-side JS unless strictly necessary, content portable as plain Markdown, fast enough to not think about performance.

Astro 6 for static generation. Same reasoning as Octa — pure HTML by default, islands opt-in. The difference here is that Pagefind is included from day one (deferred on Octa). At content volume, client-side search is more useful than a filter bar alone.

Tailwind CSS v4 via @tailwindcss/vite directly in astro.config.mjs. The old @astrojs/tailwind integration is incompatible with Tailwind v4 — it targets the v3 PostCSS plugin. The correct setup:

// astro.config.mjs
import tailwindcss from '@tailwindcss/vite';

export default defineConfig({
  vite: {
    plugins: [tailwindcss()],
  },
});

No @astrojs/tailwind in integrations. CSS theme tokens live in @theme {} blocks inside global.css.

iA Writer Quattro via @fontsource. Monospace with document aesthetics — fits the bureaucratic design brief without adding a separate font-loading strategy.

Content model

Four entry types, each a different failure mode:

posicion-revisada    → industry used to say X, now says Y
promesa-incumplida   → someone said X would happen, it didn't
prediccion-fallida   → X was forecasted, the opposite occurred
consenso-disuelto    → everyone agreed on X, no longer do

Each entry has structured fields (declaration, origin, origin_year, correction, cause, status_since) plus optional body markdown. The constraint: if correction can’t reflect documented consensus — not an opinion — the entry isn’t ready to publish.

Astro 6 Content Layer API footguns

Three breaking changes from Astro 4/5 that aren’t obvious from the migration docs:

Config location. Content collection config must be at src/content.config.ts, not src/content/config.ts. The old path silently fails.

Glob loader required. Collections no longer auto-discover content. Every collection needs an explicit loader:

import { glob } from 'astro/loaders';

const erratas = defineCollection({
  loader: glob({ pattern: '**/*.md', base: './src/content/erratas' }),
  schema: z.object({ ... }),
});

render() is a module import, not an instance method. In Astro 4 you’d call entry.render(). In Astro 6:

import { render } from 'astro:content';

const { Content } = await render(entry);

Calling entry.render() throws at runtime with no useful error message.

OG image generation

Per-entry OG images are generated at build time using sharp to convert SVG to PNG. The SVG is composed in TypeScript — layout, type badge with color, title wrapping, subtitle.

Two issues that took iteration to fix:

Font rendering in SVG. The original used iA Writer Quattro for the OG image — predictably, librsvg (what sharp uses internally) doesn’t have that font. The SVG renders with a fallback that breaks the layout. Fix: use Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif in the SVG. Predictable across environments.

Title overflow. wrapText() was splitting at 52 characters assuming 52px font. At 52px on a 1040px canvas, the actual character limit is ~26 for proportional fonts. The fix is to split conservatively (maxChars=26) and cap at 2 lines, truncating with … if needed.

text-transform: uppercase doesn’t work in SVG attributes — apply .toUpperCase() in JS before inserting the text node.

Pagefind

Pagefind runs post-build as a separate command:

"build": "astro build && pagefind --site dist"

It requires a data-pagefind-body attribute on the content container. Without it, Pagefind indexes all pages including nav and footer text. With it, pages without the attribute are excluded — which means the index is scoped to entry bodies only.

Not available in dev. The tradeoff is acceptable: search is a production concern.

git hygiene

The .astro/ directory (generated files: content modules, data store, type declarations) was committed by mistake in the initial setup — the bootstrapped .gitignore only excluded node_modules/ and dist/. The fix:

git rm -r --cached .astro/

Then add .astro/ to .gitignore. This removes the directory from the index without deleting local files, so Astro’s dev server continues working.

Design system

The design brief was “government gazette” — white background, dense information, no decoration. Three decisions that define the aesthetic:

Color only for type classification. Each of the four entry types has one muted color used exclusively for its badge. No other color in the UI except structural rules.

Dark mode via CSS custom properties. All colors are var(--color-*) tokens. The @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) block overrides the tokens — no class toggling, no JS. The dark palette is soft: #1e1e1b background, not pure black.

Band colors decoupled from paper. The header masthead is a dark band (--color-band-bg). In dark mode, if the band uses the paper color as text and the paper color inverts, the contrast breaks. The fix: dedicated --color-band-text and --color-band-muted tokens that are independent of --color-paper, so the band stays legible regardless of mode.

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