Add post: How I over-engineered my book

[benbalter]

Adds src/content/posts/2026-08-03-how-i-over-engineered-my-book.md.

The post promised in the Overcommitted write-up ("a rabbit hole that's getting its own post soon").

What it covers

Framed for a developer who knows nothing about book publishing. The unlock is stated early — an EPUB is a zip archive of XHTML and CSS, so the book is a build target, not a document — and everything else follows from that:

• The CSS-to-CSS transpiler that downgrades modern CSS for e-readers, with a real before/after of the .tldr rule
• Shipping to a runtime with no DevTools, no error console, and no published spec
• The Kindle transparent-PNG bug (Twemoji's transparent pixels are dark slate, so renderers that flatten alpha draw a charcoal box) and the two-iteration fix
• Seven blocking prose linters plus six custom rules
• An honest accounting: 1,065 of 4,944 commits touched the toolchain, about one in five

Ends on the archive sweep that surfaced typos live since 2011, which sets up a follow-up post on accessibility.

Verification

Check	Result
vale --minAlertLevel=error	0 errors
markdownlint-cli2	0 issues
remark (report-only)	no issues
prose-quality + front-matter	1,332 passing
astro build	page renders; all three :quote directives resolve to id="quote-*" anchors

Frontmatter uses title/description/tldr per the collection schema. No hideBookCta, so the standard book CTA appends.

Notes for review

• Résumé link is absolute (https://ben.balter.com/resume.pdf) rather than relative. The prose-quality link resolver only checks .md/.mdx/.html, so it can't resolve Astro pages — both /resume.pdf and /resume/ fail it. This matches the existing convention in the archive, which also links the résumé absolutely. Post links stay relative, since those resolve fine.
• Title is 29 characters, under the 50–60 the writing guide suggests for SEO. Left as-is deliberately; happy to lengthen if you'd rather hit the range.
• Local astro build fails at the astro:build:done hook because astro-pdf can't launch Chromium in this environment. Unrelated to the post — page HTML generates fine, and CI caches its own Chrome.

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