What’s on the bench

Three dead links in the footer’s “elsewhere” column — podcast, rss, email — sitting as href="#" since the nav/footer chrome first shipped.

The decision

The Lawyerist Podcast link now points at lawyerist.com/podcast. A real /rss.xml feed exists, built with Astro’s official @astrojs/rss package. And rather than a standalone email link, that slot became LinkedIn and GitHub profile links instead.

How I took it apart

RSS needed actually building, not just linking — the first real feed on this site. Each item carries title, link, pubDate, and categories, plus a description that reuses postMetaCrossPillar() — the same short meta line (“legal tech · teardown”) already doing this job on the Hub’s latest-posts grid. Considered shipping full post content in the feed instead of a meta line, but the schema has no excerpt field to draw a summary from, and full-content RSS in Astro means rendering content through the experimental container API — more machinery than a personal site’s feed needs right now. A reader who wants the whole post clicks through.

The email link took a detour before it became LinkedIn and GitHub. First instinct was a dedicated contact page. Caught it with one question before building anything: does this site need a contact surface at all, given /speaking already ships a real booking form for the actual “reach out about work” case? It didn’t. A public mailto: would have been a second contact surface doing a smaller version of a job the site already does properly elsewhere, plus the standing spam-scraper exposure every public email address picks up. Pointing the same footer slot at real LinkedIn and GitHub profiles costs nothing and matches how people already expect to reach someone.

What I got wrong (or don’t know yet)

Whether the feed should ever carry full content instead of a meta line is still open — revisit if an actual reader asks for it, not before.

Next up

Real assets for /speaking aside, Build is down to one tabled item — “a game as a front door” — before Launch.

Costs so far: $12/yr + Buttondown (free tier) / __ hours