CHAPTERS
01 — THE BRIEF
Premium, current and in season, every week of the year.
The Edit is where DADO shows taste before it sells anything. Products, gift guides and editorials have to feel like a luxury magazine, and stay fresh as the year turns.
01
Premium layouts
Large imagery, quiet type and room to breathe, set like a luxury magazine.
02
Always current
Pages pick up new products and retire old ones without anyone rebuilding them.
03
In season, everywhere
A calendar that covers the occasions members celebrate around the world, not one country’s holidays.
MY PART ON THE EDIT
The editorial surfaces: seasonal chapters and gift guides that run full-bleed, read like a magazine and still end on something to buy
Measured scrims: white type over photography set by compositing over the brightest sixteenth of the image, not by eye
The type and colour rules every page is built on
02 — THE SHORT VERSION
A luxury magazine, kept in season all year.
PROBLEM
Staging held ten seasonal editions, production held one, and an automated check said everything was fine.
WHAT WE DECIDED
Run The Edit as one system: Airtable feeds the catalogue, with one navigation, one city template and one item model. Then read every page before it ships.
RESULT
Ten seasons live with zero dead links in the nav, eleven city Editions, a catalogue that refreshes every six hours, and a wishlist that tells the truth.
03 — THE CALENDAR
Ten seasons, from Halloween to wedding season.
The Calendar runs through the whole year, so members who celebrate different things all find their season. It is also the index of every edition on the site.
THE CALENDAR · TEN SEASONS IN RUNNING ORDER
01
Halloween
October
02
Diwali
Early to mid November
03
Thanksgiving
November
04
Black Friday
Late November
05
Cyber Monday
The Monday after
06
Giving Tuesday
The Tuesday after
07
Hanukkah
December
08
Christmas
December
09
New Year
Late December
10 · IN SEASON
Wedding Season
April to September
Today, 29 September: Wedding Season is in season. From January to March nothing is, and the next edition to open leads.
04 — THE CATALOGUE
Airtable holds the catalogue. Every page reads from it.
Products, brands, gift guides and lists live in Airtable, so anyone on the editorial side can add or change them without touching a page. The admin console pulls Airtable in on a schedule and shows what it synced, affiliate products included.
01 · AIRTABLE
Source of truth
Editors add products, brands and gift guides as rows, never on the pages.
02 · ADMIN CONSOLE
Syncs every six hours
A Sync now button, a sync history, and a list of missing links.
03 · THE EDIT
Pages read the catalogue
A product Airtable drops goes inactive. A failed sync keeps the last good content.
59
gift guides
479
brands
678
gift guide items
665
products, 494 of them live
Staging counts from Airtable at the time of recording, 24 September 2026.
05 — DECISIONS
Four calls that turned a brief into a magazine on production.
D01
One navigation, with the Calendar as the index
WHY
The PRD puts The List, DADO Presents, Editions and gifts on one platform and one item model, so a story can end on something you can wish for. The Edit sits in the global nav beside Browse and One Big Wish.
WHAT IT COST
The homepage reads its own data file, and two files can disagree about what is current. The September catch-up was one such disagreement, fixed by hand.
D02
One city template reading one data file
WHY
The first six cities shipped with three sections each: The Hotels, The Tables and The Addresses. Five more cities were later added as data entries, with no new pages.
WHAT IT COST
A city that wants its own layout has to earn a template change. One template bug reaches all eleven pages at once.
DADO EDITIONS · ONE TEMPLATE, ELEVEN CITIES
Paris
The city as its residents keep it.
06 chapters
London
Where understatement was invented.
03 chapters
Tokyo
The city of small perfect rooms.
03 chapters
New York
The city of second chances and late dinners.
03 chapters
Plus seven more cities, each one data entry. A new city is one more entry, not a new page.
D03
Read every page, because a page that loads can still be broken
WHY
An automated crawl said everything was clean. Reading the pages found dead links, images that loaded a web page instead of a photo, and pages giving search engines the wrong address.
WHAT IT COST
The link checker now compares every part of each address and lists its six known false alarms. The image check opens every file, so it runs slower.
18
dead links on the Gift & Give hub
7
more in the mobile menu
33
images that loaded a web page instead of a photo
11
pages giving search engines the wrong address
D04
Two kinds of list folded into one, and a delete that tells the truth
WHY
Collections and wishlists had drifted into two separate stores for the same idea, and a filter sent every birthday list to Collections. A delete could report success while the list stayed on screen.
WHAT IT COST
The old tables stay so a rollback is possible, and merged lists start private. Every delete makes one extra check.
DELETE, BEFORE
Collection deleted
The app said deleted even when nothing was, because the database reports success either way.
DELETE, SHIPPED
The collection was not deleted.
It may already be gone, or belong to another account. A delete that did nothing now says so.
06 — EDITORIAL SURFACES
Browsing that reads like a magazine and still ends on something you can buy.
1
The Edit
2
The List Edit
3
DADO Presents
4
DADO Editions
5
Calendar
Screen 1 of 5 · The Edit
The magazine front door
A seasonal hero leads, followed by curated collections, Off-Script, Objects of Desire, The Definitive, and the City Guides, Seasons and Atelier chapters, before Trending Now.
Its purpose is browsing that reads like a magazine and still ends on something you can actually buy. It runs full-bleed on its own gutter scale.
The five editorial surfaces. Click a tab to see it, and scroll inside the frame to see the whole page.
07 — ALSO DECIDED
Smaller calls that kept it honest.
ALSO DECIDED
Pasted links
A pasted link brings its colours and sizes to a wishlist, through the same product page a wish uses.
Clones collapsed
H&M’s 58 option rows became 46 real choices, and Dior’s 17 identical tiles one size axis.
A faster picker
The option picker answers in 10.8 seconds, down from 39.4, and says what it is doing after six.
Its own photographs
25 look-alike chapter pages fixed; covers went from 4.5MB of JPEG to 1.9MB of WebP.
One-line fix, eleven pages
One line in the city template gave all eleven city pages the right address for search engines.
A calendar that checks itself
32 automated checks flag the Calendar index when it falls out of date.
08 — OUTCOME
Ten seasons live, eleven cities, one catalogue behind every page.
Shipped in the private beta. Reading is not measured yet, so whether a List reads in ninety seconds is still untested.
10
seasonal editions on production, up from one
11
city Editions on one template
0
dead links in the seasonal nav after review
1
product page for a wish and a wishlist pick
09 — REFLECTION
Read the page, not the report.
Every real problem in the September move was invisible to an automated check and obvious on the page.
The image check that opens every file should have existed before the first chapter shipped, before thirty-three images broke.
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Copyright @2026 Manish Durgude