A single local program that researches, writes, evaluates, compiles, and runs a whole portfolio of niche book-review sites — each on its own five-dollar VPS. The writing and judgment run through Claude Code on a subscription, so the marginal cost of another article, or another entire site, is effectively zero.
Internally: BookEngine — the "customCMS" experiment, a content-management system with no CMS to log into.
There is no admin panel on the internet. One local brain owns the database, does the thinking, compiles static HTML, and pushes it out. Each domain is a dumb, fast binary that only serves.
Per domain, per book, on a schedule — the brain turns a title into a published, cross-linked review.
Reviews aren't standalone pages. Every book cross-references the whole library, so a review can
say "if you liked this, try…" and mean it. Tables carry a typed prefix —
BK_books, AU_authors, BR_book_relationships — so the schema
reads like a map.
Personas that watch videos and read threads on TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and X — engaging authentically to build credibility first, and only promoting once they've earned it. The analytics loop pulls data back from every VPS for cross-domain insight.
modernc.org/sqlite, no CGo) — cross-compiles to Linux triviallyclaude -p --output-format json. Subscription, not metered API — zero marginal costTBL_ prefix conventionFiled under customCMS because that's the question it started as — what does a content management system look like with no CMS to log into? It began as a pure-Zig concept and became a working Go engine with a real pipeline, database layer, and compiler. It stays local: the interesting part isn't code anyone needs, it's the idea — move the whole editorial operation to one brain, and let the internet only ever see the output.