A Val Town-powered newsletter system for curating and sending design engineering news twice a week.

• 📧 Email Subscription Management: Subscribe/unsubscribe endpoints
• 🔍 Automated News Search: Uses Tavily API to find latest design engineering content
• 🤖 AI-Powered Summaries: Hugging Face generates newsletter summaries
• ⏰ Scheduled Sending: Automatically sends twice weekly (Monday & Thursday at 9 AM UTC)
• 💾 SQLite Database: Tracks subscribers and newsletter history
• 📬 Resend Integration: Reliable email delivery

You need to set these environment variables in your Val Town project:

1. TAVILY_API_KEY - Get from Tavily

   • Used for searching design engineering news

2. HUGGING_FACE_API_KEY - Get from Hugging Face

   • Used for generating AI summaries
   • Uses the facebook/bart-large-cnn model

3. RESEND_API_KEY - Get from Resend

   • Used for sending newsletter emails

4. ADMIN_API_KEY - Set this to a secure random string

   • Used to authenticate manual newsletter triggers
   • Generate with: openssl rand -hex 32

5. FROM_EMAIL - Your verified sender email (e.g., newsletter@yourdomain.com)

   • Must be verified in Resend

6. TAVILY_SEARCH_QUERY (optional)
   • Default: "design engineering news product design"
   • Customize the search query for finding articles

Returns API information and available endpoints.

Subscribe to the newsletter.

Request:

{
  "email": "user@example.com",
  "name": "John Doe"
}

Response:

{
  "message": "Successfully subscribed to Design Engineer Newsletter!",
  "email": "user@example.com"
}

Unsubscribe from the newsletter.

Request:

{
  "email": "user@example.com"
}

Response:

{
  "message": "Successfully unsubscribed",
  "email": "user@example.com"
}

Manually trigger newsletter generation and sending (admin only).

Headers:

X-Admin-Key: your-admin-api-key

Response:

{
  "message": "Newsletter sent successfully",
  "recipientCount": 42,
  "articlesCount": 10,
  "status": "success"
}

• id - Auto-increment primary key
• email - Unique email address
• name - Subscriber name (optional)
• subscribed_at - Timestamp of subscription
• active - Boolean flag (1 = subscribed, 0 = unsubscribed)

• id - Auto-increment primary key
• sent_at - Timestamp of newsletter send
• recipient_count - Number of recipients
• articles_count - Number of articles included
• status - Send status (success/failed)

The newsletter automatically sends twice a week:

• Monday at 9:00 AM UTC
• Thursday at 9:00 AM UTC

Schedule is configured using cron expression: 0 9 * * 1,4

• main.ts - HTTP API handler with subscribe/unsubscribe endpoints
• newsletter.ts - Core newsletter generation logic (Tavily, Hugging Face, Resend)
• scheduler.ts - Interval job for automated twice-weekly sending

curl -X POST https://your-val-url.val.run/subscribe \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"email":"test@example.com","name":"Test User"}'

curl -X POST https://your-val-url.val.run/admin/send \
  -H "X-Admin-Key: your-admin-api-key"

You can customize the Tavily search query in two ways:

1. Set the TAVILY_SEARCH_QUERY environment variable
2. Pass a custom query when calling the admin endpoint (modify code as needed)

Example queries:

• "design engineering product design UX UI"
• "design systems engineering frontend"
• "interaction design developer experience"

• Val Town uses Deno runtime - use npm: imports for packages
• Free tier has 15-minute minimum for interval jobs
• Pro tier allows 1-minute minimum intervals
• Resend batch API supports sending to multiple recipients efficiently

For issues or questions, refer to:

• Val Town Docs
• Tavily API Docs
• Hugging Face API Docs
• Resend API Docs