<dev> · The Starter

The Starter

My shared code framework — the reusable spine under the products I ship. Named, of course, after the other one. Here are the actual pieces, each of them running on this very site.

Products built on The Starter are licensed by me, Gina Lyn Cox, to the organizations that use them under perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive terms. You get working software you fully control, with a clean paper trail.

Live device bridge

A server-held OAuth + WebSocket to a cloud appliance API, streamed to browsers as sanitized Server-Sent Events. The token never leaves the server; visitors get read-only status.

Runs the starter card & kitchen dashboard →

Content-to-email engine

Watches the site’s own RSS feeds and drafts a reviewed newsletter the moment new content ships — draft-only, fail-safe, with a per-source watermark so nothing double-sends.

Drafts my newsletter on publish →

Offers pipeline

A fail-safe scheduled fetch from a partner API into a date-gated, self-expiring callout, with self-healing failure alerts. Never wipes live data on a bad run.

Powers the Kit page offers →

Ops dashboard

A password-protected panel (HMAC-cookie auth, login rate-limiting, no session store) for the stuff that changes — status, subscribers, run health.

Private admin surface

Static build system

A single Python generator that renders every page from Markdown — recipes, guides, field notes, feeds, sitemap — reproducibly, so a deploy is always rebuildable from source.

Builds this whole site