Phase 2 of the guide-builder Astro subtree is complete and live. The guide landed with a full visual redesign, a newsroom regression got caught and fixed, and the homepage got design polish on the radio player and about card.
The guide landing page was rewritten with the newsroom card pattern — 2-column grid, category gradients, ghost letter, tier pills. Consistent with the visual language already established elsewhere on the site. The list landing got 1-column editorial cards with a numbered watermark overlay. The [slug].astro page was updated to remove ListBadge from the h1 and add tier pills above the opinion box.
Before deploying, the-mesquite.mdx placeholder got cleaned: removed fictional officialWebsite, wikidataId, and reservationsUrl fields. No invented structured data reaches Google. That's a hard rule and it held.
Diagnosed a regression in index.html — the .catch() fallback block, which is the only rendering path that ever actually executes, had been replaced with a generic archive link during an earlier edit. The Beehiiv top four hardcoded cards were gone. Verified the correct cards were unchanged in git history, restored them verbatim. The warning comment above that block now makes the intent explicit: this is active content, not a fallback, and it should not be touched without understanding what it's doing.
Radio player updated to dark indigo gradient with yellow track name — consistent with the overall color system. About card updated to dawn violet (--rise-bg) with Human Rhythm Engine tint. Small changes, but the kind that make the page feel deliberate rather than assembled.
Four Cloudflare Pages deploys across the session. Two git commits plus push, then a cleanup commit to untrack node_modules/, dist/, and .astro/ after they slipped into the initial scaffold commit — 10,368 deletions, all noise.