Fanzine Press

A web app for building newspaper-style fanzines, PDF-exportable and deeply ink-stained, for football fan publications and other lovingly-produced small-circulation delusions.

Made with AI-Sloptronic™ technology. Warnings: may contain traces of confidently-wrong whitespace, emergent politeness, and stray <div>s.

Fanzine Press lets an editor cobble together an issue — title page, articles, photos, ads, colophon — in a Greek-language Razor Pages UI, then prints it to a PDF that actually looks like something a minor football club from the 1970s would have mimeographed in a back office.

It's what happens when a human Product Manager hands specifications to a Large Language Model and the LLM, rather than suffering an existential crisis, just ships the thing.

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Features

Issues — the fundamental unit of regret

• Create, edit, publish/unpublish issues (Draft / Published status) — publishing is what makes an issue publicly readable on the web.
• Upload a title image. Yes, it goes in the database, because filesystems are for people who have backups.
• Per-issue ownership — editors see their own, admins see everything, nobody sees what they want.
• One built-in template ("classic"). The architecture swears it supports more. The architecture has been known to lie.

Articles

• Title, subtitle, author, body, column span (1–3), order.
• Plain-text body. No WYSIWYG editor, because a WYSIWYG editor would have required convincing the AI not to reinvent TinyMCE from scratch four times in a row. We lost that battle.
• Reordering via an order field, because drag-and-drop is a rabbit hole that ends in JavaScript frameworks and heartbreak.

Photos

• Upload images; stored as BLOBs in the SQLite database. This is either elegant or a war crime, depending on whom you ask.
• Caption, credit.
• Vintage film effect (CSS sepia/grayscale) per photo, so every issue can look like it was scanned from a shoebox.
• Image API at /api/images/photo/{id}. Images of published issues are public (so the web view works for anonymous readers); draft images still require a login and ownership.

Ads

• Quarter / Half / Full page.
• Text or image ads.
• Ordering. That's it. It's a zine, not Google.

Layout & Typography

• Three-column newspaper layout with column rules, Georgia serif, double-line borders, #fdf6e3 background, UPPERCASE HEADLINES, and all the other little tells that say "yes, this was deliberate, no, it is not 2003 anymore".
• A4 page size, 15mm margins, print backgrounds on.
• Colophon section: publication name, editors, contributors, contact, license, extra prose.

PDF Export

• Renders the Preview page through a real headless Chrome baked into the Docker image (not snap-shim Chromium, we tried, it cried).
• Auth cookies are forwarded to Puppeteer so it can actually fetch the protected pages. Machines logging in to pages written for humans to show to other humans — the circle of life.
• Output: an A4 PDF that you can print, email, or frame.

Web View (public page)

• Every issue also renders as a standalone, responsive webpage at /Issues/Web/{id} — the same content as the print preview, but in a readable article-first layout: stacked articles, drop caps, inline photos, ads and colophon, mobile-friendly.
• Published issues (and their images) are visible to anyone, no login required — share the link, that's the point. Draft issues stay private to their owner and admins.
• Includes Open Graph meta tags so links unfurl nicely when shared.

Authentication & Admin

• ASP.NET Core Identity. Email + password, 8+ chars, digit + lowercase.
• Remember-me, 14-day sliding sessions, account lockout.
• Roles: Admin and Editor.
• Admin panel: list users, create users, toggle roles, delete users. Cannot demote or delete yourself — even the software knows better than to let you rage-quit at 2am.
• No self-registration, no password reset flow. This is deliberate; also it is a feature the AI never got around to building.

Versioning

• Footer shows v{SemVer} · {short-git-hash} so when things break you at least know which version is broken.
• Stamped into AssemblyInformationalVersion at build time via git describe --tags → Docker --build-arg → MSBuild /p:Version and /p:SourceRevisionId. No .git directory inside the container, no NuGet plugins, no mysteries at runtime.

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Tech Stack

• Backend: ASP.NET Core 10 Razor Pages, EF Core, SQLite
• Frontend: htmx + vanilla JS + Bootstrap (no framework-of-the-month)
• PDF: PuppeteerSharp driving system Google Chrome
• Images: SixLabors.ImageSharp for the thumbnails that actually need resizing; BLOBs everywhere else
• Auth: ASP.NET Core Identity with Data Protection keys persisted to a volume so cookies survive container redeploys

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Running it locally

cd src/FanzinePress.Web
dotnet run

First run:

1. Database is created automatically (SQLite file next to the app).
2. PuppeteerSharp will try to download a Chromium (~200 MB) unless FANZINE_CHROMIUM_PATH is set.
3. A bootstrap admin user is created from FANZINE_ADMIN_EMAIL / FANZINE_ADMIN_PASSWORD env vars, falling back to admin@fanzinepress.local / ChangeMe123!. Change it. Seriously.

Then browse to the URL the dotnet runtime prints and log in.

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Running it in Docker

docker build -t fanzine-press:latest \
    --build-arg APP_VERSION=$(git describe --tags --always --match '[0-9]*') \
    --build-arg GIT_SHA=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) \
    .

docker run --rm \
    -p 5055:8080 \
    -v /var/lib/fanzine-press:/data \
    -e FANZINE_ADMIN_EMAIL=you@example.com \
    -e FANZINE_ADMIN_PASSWORD='something better than ChangeMe123!' \
    fanzine-press:latest

The image installs Google Chrome from Google's apt repo (Ubuntu's own chromium package is a snap-shim that refuses to start in containers — we found out the hard way, so you don't have to).

Sub-path hosting behind nginx

The image is built to run behind a reverse proxy at a sub-path like /fanzine-press:

• FANZINE_BEHIND_PROXY=true — disables in-container HTTPS redirect.
• FANZINE_PATH_BASE=/fanzine-press — wires up UsePathBase(...).
• FANZINE_DATA_PROTECTION_KEYS=/data/dp-keys — persists cookie encryption keys across container restarts.
• nginx: proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:5055; with no trailing slash — the full /fanzine-press/... path is forwarded and stripped inside the app. See deploy/nginx-fanzine-press.snippet.

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Deploying to a server

There are two deploy scripts in deploy/ that do the same thing, one per shell religion:

• deploy/build-and-deploy.sh — bash, prefers SSH key auth, sshpass fallback.
• deploy/build-and-deploy.ps1 — PowerShell, uses PuTTY plink/pscp, supports password or .ppk key.

Both scripts:

1. Compute APP_VERSION from git describe --tags --always --dirty and GIT_SHA from git rev-parse --short HEAD.
2. Pack the source tree (excluding .git, bin, obj, uploads, local DBs) into a tarball.
3. Upload it, extract on the remote, docker build with the version build-args, then systemctl restart fanzine-press.service.
4. Check the service comes back active and report the version.

The systemd unit (deploy/fanzine-press.service) runs docker run --rm with an --env-file and bind-mounts /data on the host to /data in the container, so the SQLite database and uploaded images persist.

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Architecture notes nobody asked for

• Images in the database — the BLOB approach means backups are one file. Migration is a Program.cs startup hook that sweeps wwwroot/uploads/ into the DB the first time an old instance starts up against the new schema.
• No registration flow — deliberate. Admins create editors; the world is better this way.
• The AI wrote most of the code — and then the human asked hard questions about it until it stopped being wrong.

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Credits

• Product Manager: T. Kleisas — wrangled requirements, tested in production like a champion, made executive decisions like "actually, the footer should say both the version AND the hash".
• Software Engineer: Claude (Anthropic), an LLM that suffers no ego when the compiler disagrees with it. Alignment achieved primarily via dotnet build exit codes.

The division of labor was roughly: the PM decided what and why; the AI decided how (subject to review); the compiler decided whether either of them were right.

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License

MIT. Use it, fork it, print an issue about your local team, remember that the only AI alignment that really matters is aligning the columns in the CSS.