Changelog
Every release of The Lantern, what changed in it, and when it reached the live site.
The Lantern is in beta. Running 0.9.0 · 11 releases since .
Everything that reached the live site is listed here, newest first — including the fixes, because a list of only the good news is an advertisement rather than a record. Where a release corrected something the paper had got wrong, it says so and says for how long. Versions stay below 1.0.0 while The Lantern is a pilot; that number is reserved for when it stops being one, not for when it feels finished.
0.9.0Live now
A published record
The Lantern now publishes its own release history, and every page carries the version you are reading.
- A changelog at /changelog, listing every release since the first working edition on 3 July — including the fixes, because a list of only good news is an advertisement rather than a record.
- The footer carries the running version and links to it, so a correction or a bug report can say which build it happened on.
- The Lantern is labelled beta, and will be until the pilot stops being a pilot. The version number says the same thing for anyone who reads them.
- The changelog page needs nothing from the newsroom's servers to render, which is deliberate: the most likely moment to come looking for it is just after something changed or broke.
0.8.2
Photographs at the size they were meant to be
Every photograph on the site had been rendering at its own full height instead of the shape its slot asked for, and the weather panel had been blank for three days.
- ⚠️ Photographs were the wrong size everywhere, and had been since 13 August. Each one rendered at its own stored height rather than the shape the page asked for, so a lead image stood more than twice as tall as intended and a small card showed a picture five times too tall. Every slot on every page is now the shape it was designed to be.
- ⚠️ The weather panel had been empty since 13 August. It was quietly being blocked by the site's own security rules, and because it fails silently an empty panel looked exactly like one still loading. The forecast now comes through the paper's own servers, which also means the weather service is no longer told the address of everyone who opens the front page.
- Two photographs were removed. One was the interior of a building in another city with a bank's signage in the frame; one was a care home in another country. Neither belonged on a story about New Carlisle, and both broke rules this paper had already written down for itself.
- Photographs are now drawn only from images that could honestly illustrate the subject. A drinking-water violation used to be able to fall through to a picture of a shop front; it draws a water tower.
- The front page now says outright that the photographs are library images chosen to suit the subject — never pictures of the record, the place, or the people in it. Article pages already said so; the front page, where most people arrive, said nothing.
- A product recall filed under a forty-character company name with nothing to break on was pushing the Health & Safety desk sideways on a phone. Headlines can now wrap mid-word when the filing leaves no other option.
- The soft ink-wash background was being drawn at twice its intended size on high-resolution screens, so most phones and laptops only ever saw the top-left quarter of it.
- Routine security maintenance.
0.8.1
Every page says which paper it is
Pages outside the New Carlisle edition had been claiming to be it in every browser tab and shared link, and the advertising rate card was selling three things that do not exist.
- ⚠️ Every page now carries its own title. The global edition, the search page, the account pages and the record pages had no title of their own, so they inherited the New Carlisle one — which meant a bookmark, a browser tab or a link shared to a group chat named a town those pages do not cover.
- ⚠️ The advertising rate card was offering a front-page banner, classifieds and section sponsorship. None of the three exists. Each row now says whether it is available now or not built yet — what to sell is the paper's call, whether the page is true is not.
- ⚠️ The same rate card promised to reach every household in the 45344. The paper measures no readership at all, so the claim is gone from both places it appeared.
- The section toolbar was cutting links off at every desktop width — eleven desks need more room than a laptop screen has, and the row was silently clipping them with no scrollbar to show it. The links that do not fit now move into a More menu, so no width shows half a word.
- A tip, an advertising enquiry or a job application now alerts the newsroom when it arrives, instead of waiting for somebody to open the inbox. The alert carries none of what you wrote — not your name, your contact details, or your message.
- Photographs are sent at the size they are displayed. A phone was downloading more than half a megabyte of pictures to fill slots a fraction of that size.
- Pressing Escape in the More menu returns you to the button you opened it with.
- Routine security maintenance.
0.8.0
Accounts, a masthead mark, and one footer for both editions
The Lantern got reader accounts, its own lantern mark in place of a placeholder, and a front page that can no longer print the same headline twice.
- Accounts: sign in, register, change your password or email address, sign out everywhere, and delete your account outright.
- The forgot-password form tells you the truth about what it can currently do. Where reset email is not switched on it says so and gives you an address to write to, rather than telling you to check an inbox nothing will arrive in.
- The lantern monogram replaces the placeholder circle in the masthead, on article pages, in the browser tab icon and on shared links.
- On a phone the whole toolbar now collapses into one menu, and several pages that scrolled sideways no longer do.
- About, Corrections, Privacy, Terms and Photo credits moved to the top of the site. They describe the publisher rather than a community, and both editions now link to one copy instead of drifting into two.
- The About page is rewritten in the founders' own words, and names them: Adam Sahli and Joseph Abboud.
- ⚠️ The front page could print the same headline twice, with two different photographs, which reads as a publishing error. Across the archive, 265 records shared a headline with a sibling from the same source; that is now 2.
- ⚠️ A photograph of a flooded street in southern India — with dozens of identifiable people in it, including children — had been illustrating Clark County flood watches for three days. It is deleted, and weather photographs are now matched to the hazard in the headline rather than picked by number. Checking every weather record in the archive found four more wrong pairings that reading the rules had missed.
- Desk pages get the front page's rule against one source taking over. The Health & Safety desk had been 29 items out of 30 from a single stormy day.
- Drinking-water records are filed one per compliance period rather than one per contaminant, so the desk stops showing the same headline over and over.
- Feature stories put the photograph above the headline at every width.
0.7.0
A front page that reads like a newspaper
The front page stopped being a Dayton traffic bulletin, the paper got real photography for its recurring subjects, and the legal pages stopped promising things the software could not do.
- ⚠️ The front page was eight slots out of nine of road works, every one of them fourteen to nineteen miles away in the Dayton suburbs. Every item was true, current and correctly ordered, and the page still read as somebody else's traffic report. Selection is now capped per source and per subject, then re-sorted by date — so the page is still strictly newest-first, it just stops one filer taking it over.
- ⚠️ The legal pages were promising things that could not happen. The privacy page told readers they could have a submission deleted months before anything could delete one. A policy is a promise the software has to keep.
- Consumer product recalls are now covered. These are national rather than local, and every one of them says so on its face — they are here because the products reach households everywhere.
- Recall headlines stopped reading like database rows. A regulatory field carrying barcodes, case counts and raw label text was being printed as a headline.
- Recall photographs are chosen by what was actually recalled, so a medical device no longer illustrates itself with a fruit market.
- Real photography for schools, drinking water and nursing homes, replacing images that had nothing to do with the story. Nursing home citations were illustrating themselves with restaurant kitchens.
- The next Tecumseh varsity fixtures appear in the front-page rail. It is a schedule and says so: the school publishes no scores anywhere a machine can read them.
0.6.0
Schools, water, roads and public safety
Five new desks' worth of public records, including the first coverage of Tecumseh schools and of crime figures for the office that polices the town.
- Schools: Tecumseh Local and its five schools, year by year — enrolment, staffing, and what the district takes in and spends. Seven years of the district's numbers show six straight annual declines in enrolment.
- Drinking water: every public water system in the county with a compliance history, current to this year.
- Roads: construction and incidents within twenty-five miles. Most are not in town, so every headline says how far away it is.
- Campaign money raised in the 45344, aggregated by committee and month. Never by named donor — that is a rule the paper holds itself to, not a limit of the data.
- Public Safety opens with the monthly crime figures the county sheriff's office reports federally. It is a trend line and not a blotter: the federal record carries no incident locations, dates or names. New Carlisle has no police department of its own, so no local blotter exists to publish.
- ⚠️ The paper stopped quoting a percentage when the numbers are too small to carry one. A monthly count going from 2 to 8 is 'up 300%', which is arithmetically correct and tells a reader something false about the world.
- Several sources were widened from the town to the county after measurement showed the town alone produced nothing. Federal awards went from zero items a year to seventy-nine — and every summary names the place the money actually went.
0.5.0
Length earned by evidence
Nine new record sources, and an article is now as long as its evidence supports rather than as long as the software was allowed to make it.
- Nine new public-record sources for New Carlisle, across civic filings, business, health and the environment.
- Article length is graded by how much specific evidence backs the individual record — not by how much data exists in general. A single council announcement no longer licenses twelve hundred padded words.
- ⚠️ A broken key for the drafting software used to be indistinguishable from never having tried, so the paper could have published mechanically for weeks with nothing to show anything was wrong. The two states are now told apart and reported separately.
- Every request the paper makes to a government API now identifies itself the same way, with a contact address. If an agency wants to know who is reading its filings, it can tell.
0.4.0
A paper that survives its own cold start
The archive stopped being wiped by deployments, the whole back catalogue became searchable, and pages stopped making readers wait for a sleeping server.
- The archive persists between deployments. Until now a deploy could empty it.
- Search across every article the paper has ever published.
- The front page is never empty. If the servers are still waking, you get the last edition you saw while the current one loads.
- Articles load instantly from a cache and retry by themselves while the servers wake, instead of showing an error to somebody who arrived first that morning.
- Photographs are 77% smaller and cached for a year, so a second visit costs almost nothing.
- Pages say 'waking the server' when that is what is happening, rather than looking broken.
0.3.0
Articles that cite the filing
Articles began citing the records they are drawn from, every figure started being checked against the source data, and the paper went to press once a day.
- Every article cites the records it is written from, and every citation links to the filing it came from.
- Every figure in a drafted article is checked mechanically against the source data before it publishes. If a number is not in the record, the draft is withheld and the reader gets a mechanically assembled article instead, with a note saying why.
- The city's own channels are on the record: announcements, public notices, meetings, documents, and dated council packets from newcarlisleohio.gov.
- The paper goes to press once a day rather than writing on demand, which is what keeps it affordable to run.
0.2.0
Only real records
Every piece of invented content was deleted, and the New Carlisle edition began publishing nothing but real public records.
- ⚠️ All fictional demonstration articles are gone. The New Carlisle edition publishes only real records from official sources. Desks without a live source say so honestly instead of showing something made up.
- A photo-forward front page in place of a list of links.
- Live weather, and a market panel that says what it actually knows.
- Photographs are real, freely licensed pictures with their credits kept alongside them.
0.1.0
The first edition
The first working version of The Lantern: a local paper for New Carlisle, Ohio, and the watch platform it grew out of.
- A news platform built on public records, with two editions: New Carlisle, Ohio, and a global edition where you can set a standing watch over city open data.
- Front-page search, a real map of the town, and hand-drawn spot illustrations.
- A layout built for a phone rather than shrunk onto one.
Dates are the day the work reached the live site, not the day it was written. Every entry was read out of the project’s commit history rather than recalled — the gaps between dates are real gaps. Corrections to articles, rather than to the software, are on the corrections page.