Drop the nightly rebuild timer.

The timer was load-bearing while the mint list was a build-time snapshot: a
rebuild was the only way a new mint, a new review count or a changed status ever
reached /mints. The list hydrates now, so all three arrive within a second of
load, in every language, and rebuilding 2,000 pages at 03:30 to refresh numbers
that refresh themselves is twenty minutes of CPU for nothing.

cashumints-web.service stays exactly as it is — it is the deploy-time publish
step, and now the only thing that starts it is a deploy. A build still produces
what only a build can: the prerendered HTML a crawler reads, a social card per
mint, the sitemap and hreflang set, and a /mint/{host} page for every mint known
at build time.

The one thing that gets staler is that last item. A mint indexed since the last
deploy has no prerendered page: /mint/newhost is a 404, whose resolver looks the
address up against the live API and renders it — readable, reviewable, noindex
until a deploy gives it a real page. That was already true between nightly
builds; this only lengthens the window.

README documents the one-time host commands to remove the installed timer, and
gains a "Live lists" section describing what replaced it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

deploy/cashumints-web.service

@@ -6,12 +6,23 @@
 # a social card per mint and prerenders every page from the live API. The daemon that
 # hands the result out is cashumints-site.service.
 #
-# Run it after a deploy:
+# Run it after a deploy, and only after a deploy:
 #     sudo systemctl start cashumints-web
 #
-# Mint pages are prerendered, so new mints and new review counts only appear at the
-# next build; pair this with a .timer for the nightly rebuild. There is deliberately no
-# [Install] section — a rebuild should be scheduled, not fired on every boot.
+# There used to be a cashumints-web.timer firing this at 03:30 every night, because the
+# mint list was a snapshot of whatever the API held when the build ran and a nightly
+# rebuild was the only way it ever changed. The list hydrates from the API after paint
+# now, so a new mint, a new review count and a changed status all reach the page within
+# a second of load, and rebuilding 2,000 pages at 03:30 to refresh numbers that refresh
+# themselves is 20 minutes of CPU for nothing.
+#
+# What a build still produces, and therefore what a deploy is still for: the prerendered
+# HTML a crawler reads, the social card per mint, the sitemap, and a `/mint/{host}` page
+# for every mint known at build time. A mint indexed since the last deploy has no page of
+# its own until the next one; the 404 fallback resolves it against the live API, so it is
+# readable and reviewable in the meantime. That was already true between nightly builds.
+#
+# There is deliberately no [Install] section — this belongs to a deploy, not to a boot.
 
 [Unit]
 Description=Rebuild the cashumints.space static site
@@ -93,10 +104,11 @@ ExecStart=/usr/bin/pnpm build
 # Publish, as a separate step from building.
 #
 # `astro build` empties dist before it writes, so the site server cannot read dist
-# directly — a nightly rebuild would be a nightly minute of 404s. It serves this copy
-# instead, and the copy is only touched once a build has succeeded: a failed build
-# leaves the previous site up rather than replacing it with a half-written one, which is
-# the same reason Requires=cashumints.service is above.
+# directly — a rebuild would be a minute of 404s. It serves this copy instead, and the
+# copy is only touched once a build has succeeded: a failed build leaves the previous
+# site up rather than replacing it with a half-written one, which is the same reason
+# Requires=cashumints.service is above and the same reason the mint-count gate is an
+# ExecStartPre rather than a check after the fact.
 #
 # --delay-updates stages the changed files and renames them in at the end, so the window
 # where the tree is a mix of two builds is a rename rather than a whole transfer, and
@@ -107,7 +119,7 @@ ExecStartPost=/usr/bin/rsync -a --delete-after --delay-updates web/dist/ /var/li
 # ~200 prerendered pages plus a card per mint. Minutes, not seconds, on a small VPS, and
 # TimeoutStartSec is what bounds a Type=oneshot.
 TimeoutStartSec=1800
-# A nightly rebuild should not starve the API it is reading from.
+# A build should not starve the API it is reading from.
 Nice=10
 
 # The site server runs as cashumints and reads its own files, so this no longer has to

deploy/cashumints-web.timer

@@ -1,25 +0,0 @@
-# /etc/systemd/system/cashumints-web.timer
-#
-# The nightly rebuild. Mint pages are prerendered, so a new mint or a new review count
-# appears at the next build; between builds the site stays correct because the islands
-# refresh status and reviews at runtime, and a mint indexed since the last build still
-# resolves through the client-side fallback on the 404 page.
-#
-#     sudo systemctl enable --now cashumints-web.timer
-#
-# The service it starts builds first and publishes second, so a failed build leaves the
-# running site untouched rather than replacing it with a half-written one.
-
-[Unit]
-Description=Nightly cashumints.space rebuild
-
-[Timer]
-OnCalendar=*-*-* 03:30:00
-# Run it on the next boot if the machine was off at 03:30, rather than skipping a day.
-Persistent=true
-# Without this every host rebuilds on the same second. Harmless with one VPS; free
-# insurance if there is ever a second.
-RandomizedDelaySec=15m
-
-[Install]
-WantedBy=timers.target