• How I Built a Decentralized CMS with Nostr + GitHub Actions – Part 2
  • ✅ Key Improvements (Week of June 8)
    • 🔁 1. Deduplication across relays
    • 🏷 2. Tag styling and wrapping
    • 📅 3. Proper published_at parsing
    • 🎨 4. Markdown cleanup and layout polish
    • 🤖 5. GitHub Actions automation
  • ⏱ Total Time Spent (est. 15 hours)
  • 🔜 Coming Soon
  • 🙌 Built With
  • 💡 Why This Matters

Andrew G .Stanton - June 9, 2025

§How I Built a Decentralized CMS with Nostr + GitHub Actions – Part 2

Refinements, resilience, and real-world publishing

In Part 1, I shared the first steps of building a publishing stack that puts authors in control — using Nostr for content, GitHub Actions for automation, and GitHub Pages for free, fast hosting.

But that was just the foundation.

In this second installment, I focused on improving the system with better data hygiene, styling consistency, and end-to-end automation — all while keeping things minimal and open-source.

Here’s what changed — and what’s coming next.

§✅ Key Improvements (Week of June 8)

§🔁 1. Deduplication across relays

Nostr relays often echo the same events. In the original version, my script could pull the same article multiple times.
To fix that, I updated the fetch_articles.py script to:

• Gather events from 8–10 relays concurrently using asyncio

• Flatten the results

• Deduplicate based on event.id

This brought the number of unique articles down from 90+ to around 20 — a huge cleanup win.

§🏷 2. Tag styling and wrapping

Previously, the tags were unstyled or ran off the edge of the container. Now:

• Tags wrap cleanly and align left

• Each tag has a soft background and spacing (#tag)

• Tags are parsed directly from Nostr ["t", ...] tags

It looks better. It feels more coherent. And it reflects the decentralized ethos — clean, not corporate.

§📅 3. Proper published_at parsing

Nostr events can include a ["published_at", timestamp] tag. Originally, my site sorted and displayed articles by their created_at time — which was sometimes misleading.

Now, the script:

• Extracts published_at (if present)

• Falls back to created_at if missing

• Uses this value for both sorting and display in index.html

This way, articles appear in the correct order — based on when I intended to publish them.

§🎨 4. Markdown cleanup and layout polish

Markdown content from Nostr sometimes included extra backslashes (\\) or unparsed characters. I updated the rendering logic to:

• Remove unnecessary escape characters

• Use consistent fonts, spacing, and margins

• Inherit the overall styling from stantonweb.com

Now the articles don’t just work — they feel native to the rest of my site.

§🤖 5. GitHub Actions automation

This was a big one: enabling daily auto-publishing.

I created a GitHub Actions workflow that:

• Pulls all my kind:30023 long-form articles daily from Nostr relays

• Deduplicates and filters by tag

• Generates one .html file per article and updates the index.json

• Commits the changes back to GitHub Pages — no manual pushing needed

After some token setup troubleshooting (and a wrong known_hosts key 😅), it works beautifully.

You can still run the script manually via:

bash

CopyEdit

./fetch_articles.sh

But now, it’s fire-and-forget. Just post on Nostr — the rest happens automatically.

§⏱ Total Time Spent (est. 15 hours)

• Saturday (~5h): initial build, tried sync-based fetch logic

• Sunday (~5h): rewrote with asyncio, deduplication, cleaned up article objects

• Monday (~5h): full styling pass, timestamp fixes, token creation, and automation pipeline setup

All running with zero paid infrastructure.

§🔜 Coming Soon

• 🗂 Pagination: View 10–50 articles per page

• 🗓 Monthly Archives: Top-level by Year → then Month → then article list

• 🧠 RSS Feed: Auto-generate RSS from my npub so any Nostr long-form post becomes a blog feed
  (Bonus: use it to follow others via Primal or standard readers)

§🙌 Built With

• Nostr (Primal, Damus, etc.)

• GitHub Pages + Actions

• Python (asyncio, websockets)

• A little stubbornness

• A lot of help from ChatGPT (“Dr. C”) 🧠

§💡 Why This Matters

Most people don’t own their publishing tools.
Medium can unlist you. Substack can shadowban. Even Ghost requires trust in a hosted instance.

But with Nostr + GitHub, I control the data, the visibility, and the publishing logic.

That’s the future I want — for myself, for others, for truth.

One article at a time.

🟧 View live:
https://andrewgstanton.github.io/blog-stantonweb-site
📬 Zap: https://tinyurl.com/yuyu2b9t