Blog on ix.dev: fold the margins site into index

Summary

Move the margins blog, currently the standalone repo margins-ink/margins-ink.github.io checked out at ~/Projects/margins-ink/site, into packages/site as a blog collection rendered at /blog on ix.dev. Twelve posts exist today as mdsvex pages under src/routes/(site)/thoughts/*/+page.svx. They become src/lib/blog/*.svx entries following the same eager-glob-plus-validation pattern as plans.ts and the updates feed, and the old GitHub Pages site becomes a redirect.

Motivation

Two SvelteKit sites exist with one author and one audience. The margins repo has its own mdsvex config, its own remark and rehype plugins (remark-inline-shiki.js, rehype-pages.js), its own deploy, and its own domain, all duplicating what packages/site already does with more review and better CI. Meanwhile the index site is becoming the ix.dev front door (index#3616) and has updates, plans, RFCs, and stories, but no blog: no place for essays that are neither an operator-facing update nor a design document.

The margins README pitches the blog as out-of-distribution ideas about software and systems. That is exactly the editorial surface ix.dev wants, and it already has twelve finished posts: bounty-pricing, commit, deferred-ecs, filesystems, ifd, initial-thought, introspection, mcp-not-enough, nix-cycles, nushell-tui, rerun-million-tasks, snuon.

Detailed design

• Content collection, not route port. Posts land as packages/site/src/lib/blog/<slug>.svx with typed frontmatter (id, title, postedAt, updated, tags, description), validated by a blog.ts module that mirrors plans.ts: eager glob, throw at module scope on schema violations, so nix build .#site fails on a bad post. One concept, one implementation: the site already has this pattern twice.
• Routes. /blog lists posts newest first; /blog/[slug] renders one. Both prerendered like the plans routes. The existing feed.xml gains blog entries or a /blog/feed.xml sibling, whichever the current feed code makes cheaper.
• Pipeline reconciliation. The margins repo carries remark-inline-shiki.js for inline code highlighting. If the index mdsvex config lacks an equivalent, the plugin moves with the posts; otherwise it is dropped. The rehype-pages.js collection plugin is superseded by the blog.ts glob and does not move.
• History. Import with git subtree (the playbook refresh already uses subtree filtering) so post authorship history survives; a flat copy is the fallback if the subtree graft fights the commit hooks.
• Redirect and archive. margins-ink.github.io gets a final commit: every thought URL meta-refreshes to https://ix.dev/blog/<slug>, then the repo is archived. Out of scope: the repo’s artifact and lmllmtfy routes, which are not blog content and stay behind or die with the archive.

Drawbacks

• A personal-voice blog now lives on a company domain and inside company review: every post costs a PR through index CI, and the voice question (byline, disclaimer, whose opinions) has to be answered once.
• The margins repo advertised outside contributions; contributions now require touching a large private-ish monorepo instead of a small public one.
• Twelve posts of prose enter the repo lint and site build surface; any strictness the hooks apply to prose applies to them.

Alternatives

• Do nothing. Two sites, two pipelines, and ix.dev launches without a blog while finished essays sit on a domain nobody visits.
• blog.ix.dev pointing at the existing repo. Keeps the split pipeline forever and adds DNS and TLS surface for zero consolidation.
• Cross-post. Worst of both: duplicate content, two canonical URLs, both pipelines still alive.

Prior art

• plans.ts and the updates collection in packages/site/src/lib: the exact glob-validate-prerender pattern the blog copies.
• The playbook subtree refresh: repo-history import machinery already exists in-house.
• Company engineering blogs folded into product monorepo sites are the industry default; the standalone-blog-repo era ended when static site pipelines converged.

Unresolved questions

• Route name: /blog or keep /thoughts? The old URLs say thoughts; the front door says blog.
• Byline and disclosure: posts as andrewgazelka, as ix, or per-post authors with an open-contribution note?
• Does post history justify a subtree graft, or is a flat copy with a link to the archived repo enough?

Future possibilities

Plan 0030 sketches a global knowledge graph with one ontology across people, biases, concepts, and facts. Blog posts are the most natural public nodes in that graph: each post is an entity, its margin links resolve against the ontology, and the concepts a post argues about link back to the shared agent memory facts (plan 0028) that cite them. Landing the blog inside index is what makes that wiring possible; a blog in a separate repo could never join the graph.

Drafted by an AI agent via Claude Code; comments wanted, hence the RFC flag.