The Chronically Online Gazette

• 

  Homepage

• 

• 

  Generate your gazette using AI

• 

  Rewrite your headlines mode

• 

  An extract of a chronically online gazette

The Chronically Online Gazette

Pop culture moves fast, but recaps are either too dry (traditional news) or too scattered (doom-scrolling Twitter/X). The Chronically Online Gazette solves the "I missed a week of internet" problem by generating on-demand, shareable front pages written in the exact voice of the people who actually live on the internet — GenZ's chronically online register. Instead of reading a bland listicle, you get pull quotes, fake bylines, and category tags like VIRAL and HISTORIC. It's built for the way people actually consume and share culture: quick, funny, and instantly postable.

The build was structured as a progressive conversation: starting with the core newspaper generation loop (prompt → AI → styled output), then layering in the two modes (AI Digest vs. Paste & Rewrite), then adding the sharing system, and finally integrating the Tavily live search. Each MeDo conversation tackled one feature slice — for example, one session designed the newspaper layout with fake bylines and pull quotes, another handled the category selection UI and time range logic, and another wired up the share-as-image and X post functionality. The multi-turn chat let me iterate on the GenZ tone by refining the system prompt across turns until the voice felt authentic rather than performative.

The most impressive feature MeDo helped create The Tavily + OpenAI pipeline for live web search is the standout. When the toggle is on, the app fetches real 2026 news articles via the Tavily Search API and pipes them through OpenAI to be rewritten in chronically online newspaper style — complete with fabricated bylines and satirical pull quotes. The result is a newspaper that's grounded in actual current events but voiced like a Discord server collectively having a breakdown about celebrity drama. Getting MeDo to generate the full Supabase Edge Function that handles the Tavily call, the fallback logic (if search fails, drop to general knowledge mode and notify the user), and the secret key management — all in one coherent backend — was the most technically impressive moment of the build.

Plugins and API integrations Two key integrations extend the app beyond pure AI generation: Tavily Search API for real-time web search (fetching trending topics and recent events so the newspaper reflects what's actually happening in 2026, not AI-hallucinated scenarios), and Supabase Edge Functions as the serverless backend that securely holds API keys and orchestrates the Tavily → OpenAI pipeline. On the frontend, the share system integrates with the X (Twitter) Web Intent API for one-tap posting and uses the Canvas API for save-as-image. Together these turn what could have been a simple AI wrapper into a full-stack product with real data, real sharing, and a backend architecture that scales.

Built With

• medo