feat: share cards, crawler routes, and an AEO brief

[msitarzewski]

What

The board had no description, no share card, and nothing for crawlers. A link to it rendered as a bare URL, and search or answer engines had to infer what the tool does from a JavaScript-rendered page.

Head metadata

Description, canonical, OG and Twitter card metadata with absolute image URLs, theme-color for both schemes, icons, and JSON-LD (WebSite + WebApplication) stating what FinTick does and how.

The JSON-LD deliberately claims no more than the tool does — it describes an application that aggregates, extracts, and corroborates. No NewsArticle, no Dataset, nothing implying FinTick is a news publisher or a market-data provider.

Routes

Route	Notes
/robots.txt	Points at the sitemap. Disallows /api/ (no prose to index) and ?ops — the same page plus operator telemetry, which would read as duplicate content. The canonical link covers engines that ignore the query rule.
/sitemap.xml	Single URL, changefreq: hourly.
/llms.txt	Plain-language brief for answer engines.
/og.png, /favicon.svg, /apple-touch-icon.png	Served from an allowlist so the handler never resolves a caller-supplied path. Day-long cache; the board itself stays no-store.

llms.txt states the method and the limits: what each status means, that aggregation is the dedup, that every post is preserved by URI, that social posts are stream signal and never corroboration — and that FinTick reports whether an event has been corroborated, not that it is true, and is not investment advice. Answer engines reward a stated method and explicit limits over marketing copy, and it is the honest framing regardless.

Bug fixed: HEAD returned 501

Social scrapers HEAD an og:image before fetching it. BaseHTTPRequestHandler answers 501 for any verb without a do_ method, which reads to them as a broken image. do_HEAD now routes through do_GET and drops the body, keeping every header including Content-Length.

Assets

The share card is generated at 1200×630 in the board's own visual language — brand, lede, ticker strip, a breaking card showing 0 external sources · ahead of the wire, and the status pills. The icon is an F with the wordmark's detached caret, rasterized deterministically so it has no build dependency.

pyproject.toml gains package-data; without it the assets are dropped from a built distribution and /og.png 404s. Production runs from a git checkout so this is latent, not live.

Testing

Seven new tests covering every route, asset content types and caching, that share metadata is present and absolute (a relative og:image is the classic silent break — scrapers do not resolve it), that the JSON-LD parses, that the sitemap is well-formed against the real namespace, and that HEAD returns headers with an empty body.

The HTTP harness moved into a ServedBoardFixture that carries no tests of its own — DiscoverabilityTests previously subclassed DashboardHttpTests and re-ran its entire suite.

Verified against a live server: all 10 routes return expected status, content type, and cache headers; no console errors (the CSP admits the favicon); 145 passed locally, up from 138, with the same 13 pre-existing macOS-only failures before and after.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code