Weekly Thing
A short pointer to my Weekly Thing newsletter. This category links out to weekly digests of interesting articles and personal updates; the actual archives live over on the newsletter site.
- Based on Elixir I know that Discord is a reasonable place for an agent to run.
- Based on building Thingy I know that my Weekly Thing archive is a robust knowledge base to build off of.
- Based on sending issues that meander and are just too long sometimes I know an editor would be helpful.
- Based on my own time crunch that I get into when I’m trying to make a whole issue happen in one Saturday morning I know I could use some help making it more iterative.
- Eddy is my editor who reviews everything that goes in the newsletter. Eddy assembles a working draft of the current issue of the newsletter every day and then does an editorial review of the content. Eddy shares a status and progress indicator with me in Discord.
- Linky is my researcher who assists with assessing the links I flag to go into the issue. Linky does recon to allow me to filter faster. Linky doesn’t ever look at the current issue and is just assisting with curation. Linky shares these in Discord. I’ve made it so I can reply to Linky with my commentary and it sync’s it back to Pinboard. This has allowed me to turn my commentary into a conversation.
- Marky focuses on the most recent issue of the Weekly Thing that has been published and raising awareness. I’ve done the least with Marky so far, but the goal is to get the Weekly Thing to new readers.
- Patty is the supporting membership manager who helps create call to action to bring new members in and raise money for the nonprofit we have selected. Patty operates on the annual cycle of the membership program and is the only agent that will draft content that does appear (properly sectioned) in the Weekly Thing. Patty understands the goal of the program, the organization that we are focused on this year, and what I have been writing about.
- How has the arc of AI evolved in the Weekly Thing?
- Compare Tik Tok, Facebook, and X from the archive.
- Explain to me how Jamie connects Indie Web and Crypto? They seem very opposite to me.
- This doesn’t replace or remove my actual podcast, Another Thing. There is still just one episode there but I’m not giving up on that.
- The audio for the Weekly Thing is text-to-speech using a transformed version of the email text. It announces sections, gives links numbers, announces quotes, and cuts some sections. I’ve listened to a few and think it works reasonably well.
- I’ll probably evolve the generated audio, and right now it only exists for the last 10 issues, but I plan to backfill all issues with audio over time.
- My blog
- Weekly Thing
- OmniFocus, that could be amazing
- Manuals for stuff I own
- My media library
- My photo library
- My house, or whatever that would mean
The Weekly Thing Team
I’ve been publishing the Weekly Thing for nine years and automation is one of the things that has made that possible. I shared a while back how I find content, assemble the issues, and my project structure. Without these well defined workflows there is no way I could continue this project.
The structure I have has worked well but it isn’t autonomous. It only runs when I engage with it. It is also brittle and “one way”. I can only easily run it one time. Additionally I think I could use some help getting things collected and reviewing the in process writing.
To this end I decided to create my support team for the Weekly Thing!
My starting points were:
This is the genesis of my Workshop and the four agent team that I have now created to assist me.
One thing worth being clear about: I have stated many times that “My words are mine!” and not AI’s and that is still the case. I don’t have any of these agents working to write content for me. They are my support team. The words are still mine. The only case where an LLM is “writing” or engaging with anyone is Thingy, the librarian for the Weekly Thing, and the Supporting Membership program where I have an explicit preference that that be a different voice than mine.
Here is the broad outline of the multi-agent solution that allows me to have dedicated agents that focus on different aspects of publishing the newsletter each week. This allows me to focus more on writing and commentary!
Each of these agents are operating with a full set of tools that include the entire archive of the Weekly Thing. As a result they are much more tuned to the job at hand than a generic LLM.
I’m focused mostly on Eddy and Linky right now as they are core to my authoring cycle. I can already see that this is going to allow me to focus on the content more, will be a quality of life improvement to get more incremental content and less scrambling at the end of the publishing cycle, as well as a more readable final email to subscribers.
Massive Weekly Thing Website Build
I’ve commented that agentic coding makes things that were previously on your “list of impossible projects” into things that you can do. I have long had on my “impossible project” list the desire to create a website for the Weekly Thing that let the archive shine in ways that I knew were possible but no solution out there delivered. With 9 years of writing and 345 issues in the archive there is so much to surface.
To do this I knew I would need to build it on my own. I could use the Buttondown API to get the issues and make them accessible. But then I needed a website. I needed a content pipeline. Oh, and that archive has old formats from different platforms that were a mangled mess of HTML.
This was truly on the “impossible list” for me personally. If I wanted to spend tens-of-thousands of dollars, or probably even more, I maybe could have hired someone to build it. A laughable idea really.
So I decided to take my experiences with Claude Code, Claude Design, and Codex and point it at this problem. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on the new Weekly Thing website experience.
I just have to say I’m so thrilled with the results that I can barely handle it. Rather than type a novel here I’m just going to list out what the site has. Even better, go there and explore:
https://weekly.thingelstad.com
Here is what the new site has!
1️⃣ Completely reimagined landing page to describe the Weekly Thing. Gone is the basic Buttondown paragraph of text and a signup button. The home page hopefully gives a much better feel for what the Weekly Thing is.
2️⃣ Archive page has full index of every issue back to number 1. This is also now optimized for the Weekly Thing with issue images, link counts, organized by year.
3️⃣ Thingy, the Weekly Thing librarian that has read every issue of the Weekly Thing and is ready to converse with you about all of it. I have wanted to make an agent like this for over a year and it is finally real. I’ve found this fascinating to play with and ask questions of.
You will see this feature requires you to provide your subscriber email address. It is only available to confirmed subscribers of the Weekly Thing.
You may recall in WT311 I shared a custom GPT that was sort of like this. That was grade school level. Thingy is much smarter!
Some prompts that are fun to explore with Thingy:
4️⃣ Search is now super powered. The searching is indexed into the section of the weekly thing. This works way better than before.
5️⃣ On the page for each issue you will see that there is a Table of Contents on the left. It is a little thing, but another example of something I’ve wanted for a long time. The Weekly Thing is long and this gives a way to navigate. Also, each of those items is a hyperlink so you can now send a link to a specific notable link in a specific issue.
6️⃣ Big one – you can now LISTEN to the Weekly Thing. I’ve filled this in for the last 10 issues. On the issue page there is a “Listen” button where it will be read for you.
7️⃣ Podcast? Well if I have an audio file for each issue why not bundle that into a podcast. So I did. You should be able to find the Weekly Thing on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It is propagating through other platforms. Should be on Overcast too.
8️⃣ Support for LLMs.txt! This is a bit hidden, but if you want to talk with the LLM of your choice about the Weekly Thing, give the LLM this link:
https://weekly.thingelstad.com/llms.txt
That provides an LLM optimized index of the entire 345 issues, as well as links to LLM optimized versions of every email! This means ChatGPT or Claude or whatever else can dive deep into the content. I have actually used this myself when asking a model to do some research with me.
A quick note about the audio:
Take a look. Try out the archive, search, Thingy. Listen to an issue. And let me know what you think… anything not work right? Read wrong? Something missing? Or just that you think it is all cool?
Up and writing at 6am for the next Weekly Thing!
While I’m doing that I’ve got Claude Code backfilling audio versions of the Weekly Thing, and another Claude Code instance doing some incremental work on Elixir.
The print copies of the Yearly Thing arrived from Lulu! I’m very happy with how the formatting worked with Vellum and the production from Lulu is terrific. It is really cool to explore the year of the Weekly Thing like this. You can buy your own on Lulu.
I just finished up this Weekly Thing adjacent project that I started over Christmas. Just a bit more to finalize distribution! I’m looking forward to sharing this. All the proceeds will be going to the Weekly Thing Supporting Membership program. 🙌
I gave Gemini “Thinking 3 Pro” and Nano Banana Pro a more interesting question tonight. I asked it:
Please create an infographic that explains how I create the Weekly Thing. Use these three blog posts as your foundation for the process:
The result is incredible. It has one error on the “Delete” step and how that connects to Pinboard.
Farewell Ponder and Weekly Thing Forum
In September 2023, I introduced the Weekly Thing Forum with the hope of creating a space for readers of the Weekly Thing to connect with each other and continue topics that may have started in the Weekly Thing. The Forum itself is hosted on Ponder, which aligns closely with the ethos of the IndieWeb and the Weekly Thing. Recently, Good Enough, the makers of Ponder, announced that Ponder is being shut down. With that, the Weekly Thing Forum is also going to come to an end.
In the two years of the Forum, we had 86 people join and 107 discussions. We shared some exclusive POAPs, experimented with some different things, and did many other things. I briefly considered finding a new home for the Forum, but nothing made much sense. If folks really have an itch for that, there is the (very quiet) Weekly Thing subreddit at r/WeeklyThing.
I want to thank the gang at Good Enough for taking a run at something like Ponder. I also applaud that they gave everyone the ability to download a usable HTML archive of any groups on Ponder, as well as to delete their group’s data. They kept their focus on those core values even when things weren’t going the way they wanted, and I applaud that.
I will bring back the “Reply All” section whenever it makes sense. That will bring conversations that arrive in my mailbox from issues back into the newsletter at times. As a final nod and Thank You to Ponder, I decided to create a Farewell Ponder POAP and share it with users of the service. If you would like one, send me an email and I’ll get you a claim code!
Enjoying an Espresso and Cappuccino at Monogram Coffee in downtown Calgary while sending this morning’s Weekly Thing.
I’m wondering what MCP endpoints I would like to have:
Today Buttondown released a new comments feature! I’ve turned this on for the Weekly Thing — it is something I’ve wanted to try for a while. You can leave comments on any issue in the archive.