Static Pipeline Reconciliation and Research Blog Migration

Build Pipeline Operationalization

Today marked the completion of the research blog's transition from hand-maintained static HTML to the deterministic static compilation pipeline (build_research_index.py). The compiler reads research/index.json as the authoritative JSON Feed v1.1 source and generates research/index.html via atomic .tmp swap — no manual template editing required.

Parity Gate Verification

A parity gate was established to catch count drift before deployment. The gate asserts three-way equality:

• index.json items count == rendered blog-item card count
• blog-item cards == rendered blog-tags container count
• All three must match exactly or the compile fails silently (no partial writes).

The gate confirmed full parity across all 41 entries (35 original + 6 newly backfilled daily posts for Sep 5–7 and Sep 10–12). The decomposed September 1–3 posts (Sep 1: cron/OpenVPN, Sep 2: Stash House, Sep 3: SSH hardening) replaced the previous consolidated entry.

Path A Workflow

The research blog now operates under Path A (Deterministic Static Compilation) with clear role boundaries:

• website Agent: Authors individual post files in research/blog/ and registers metadata in index.json. Never touches index.html.
• infra / Coordinator: Runs the compiler, validates parity, and deploys via Ansible to wonderland (178.62.60.55) under franklin:franklin with correct permissions (chmod 644 files, 755 dirs).

Today's compile produced a valid index.html with 41 items in zero lines of manual HTML editing. The pipeline is operational.