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ZNova project · Website · 2026
A non-commercial site that explains six humanitarian crises in two-minute, UN-sourced briefings and links straight to verified charities. Built pro bono.
ZNova projectWebsite · 2026
Trendsplained news explainers
A plain-English news site that explains why things trend online, with a fact-check step before every article goes live and built-in ad click stats.
Built byAhsan NadeemAbout this project
The challenge
People often see a topic everywhere online and want to know why. Most articles repeat what happened, but few explain how it started or whether it matters. Trendsplained answers those questions in plain English.
The site had to be easy for one person to run and quick to load on a phone. It also had to make careless publishing difficult, so no article goes live until someone has read it and checked its facts.
The approach
We built a fast static website where each article is a simple Markdown file. Every story follows the same format: a short summary, the full explanation, a clear opinion and its sources.
Articles are written in a CMS or a text editor and stored in Azure DevOps. Each change is tested automatically before it is published to Cloudflare.
The design looks like a plain newspaper, with a white page, black text and one red accent, so the writing stays the focus. Readers can search every story straight from the browser.
The outcome
The site has 18 researched explainers across six sections, from AI and apps to games and science. Each was reviewed for clarity, checked against its sources and compared with them for copied wording.
Automated tests check every page at three screen sizes for accessibility and broken links. They also confirm that drafts and unchecked articles stay off the public site.
Inside the product.
A look at the screens. Drag the front one aside or use the arrows to flip through.
- trendsplained / home page
Home page (1 / 4)
How it's built, layer by layer.
From what people see down to what it runs on, with the stack behind each layer.
trendsplained · architecture
Interface
- Astro
- TypeScript
- Pagefind
- Newspaper layout with section and topic pages
- Full-screen phone menu and in-browser search
- Accessible to WCAG 2.2 AA
Content
- Markdown
- Decap CMS
- Markdown articles with validated fields
- A publishing rule that needs a person's fact check
- Dated corrections and a source list on every story
Server
- Cloudflare Pages Functions
- Brevo
- Newsletter sign-ups through Brevo
- First-party ad click tracking with automatic deletion
- A private analytics dashboard drawn on the server
Delivery
- Cloudflare
- Azure Pipelines
- Playwright
- Static pages on Cloudflare's edge, D1 for click records
- Automated tests, plus a daily rebuild for scheduled stories
- Strict Content Security Policy and sitemaps for search
What shipped.
The capabilities that went live, one card each.
A rule against careless publishing
A story goes live only when it's out of draft, its date has arrived and a person has marked it fact-checked. Tests guard this rule.
One format for every story
A short version, how it spread, the writer's view, common questions and sources, all from structured fields.
Built for search
Article structured data, XML and news sitemaps, RSS, and thin pages kept out of Google until they have enough stories.
Fast on a phone
Prerendered pages, responsive WebP images and almost no JavaScript, so readers get the story straight away.
An audience of its own
A weekly briefing sign-up on every article, which works without JavaScript.
Ad clicks you can read
A private dashboard shows clicks by day, ad, article and location, leaves out flagged bots and deletes records after 90 days.
Decisions that shaped it.
The engineering calls behind the build, and why they were made.
Files over a database
Articles live in Git as Markdown, so every change has a history and the site has almost nothing to attack.
A CMS that writes to Git
Decap CMS is free and has an Azure DevOps backend, so editing needs no separate server.
A server only where needed
Sign-ups, click tracking and the dashboard run as small Cloudflare functions, and everything else is static.
Tests as the safety net
New articles can't quietly break a page, because accessibility, link and layout checks run across the site before each deploy.
Got a workflow nobody's tool quite fits?
That's the kind we like. Tell us about it and we'll reply with how we'd approach it.