Notes from the engine room.
What we've learned building and running publishing systems: WordPress at scale, AWS for media, and the calm habits that keep a newsroom online.
Featured · 10/07/2026
How fourteen governments build design systems, and what Syria's new identity needs next
A field analysis of 14 national government design systems and what a modern RTL-first one takes, using Syria's new identity as the case study.
15/07/2026
Your WordPress says the email sent. It didn't.
WordPress sends mail through PHP's mail() by default, and the usual SMTP fix stores your credentials in wp_options. Here is how to send through Amazon SES with an IAM role, so there are no credentials to leak, and no silent failures to miss.
05/07/2026
The day YouTube deleted our channel
A platform can delete your channel in one action, and a newsroom's entire video archive with it. Here is the architecture that turned that into a one-click recovery: keep the original in S3, treat YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo and your own infrastructure as interchangeable play sources, and make playback a setting rather than a hard-coded embed.
30/06/2026
Make WordPress do less: offloading media to S3 and the edge
On-the-fly image derivatives instead of twenty pre-generated sizes, browser-direct uploads for multi-gigabyte video, clean generated S3 keys, and two-tier storage. How the NUZ media pipeline keeps WordPress lean on S3 and CloudFront.
25/06/2026
Short links that outlive the vendor: a newsroom URL shortener on WordPress and AWS
Long Arabic URLs collapse into unreadable garbage on social. Here is the branded short-link system we built on WordPress and AWS, with Bitly as a swappable front and our own edge as the hot standby, so shared links survive any vendor switch.
20/06/2026
The 200-byte trap: why WordPress core updates break Arabic URLs
A routine WordPress update can silently truncate every long Arabic URL on your site. The root cause is in core, and the fix that survives every update.
15/06/2026
How we built mantek.io for the price of a domain
The site you're reading runs on the edge for the price of its domain, static Astro on Cloudflare Pages, a git-based CMS, and a perfect Lighthouse score.
10/06/2026
Inside a breaking-news WordPress + AWS architecture
When a story breaks, traffic doesn't grow. It detonates. The architecture that carried a pan-Arab broadcaster through five years, outage-free.
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