Add a page to machinebehavior.io

Stefan Coetzeecreated 2026-10-09updated 2026-10-091 min read

A new page passes the gate when it has a directory URL, a self canonical, a sitemap entry, an llms.txt line and root-absolute links. Docs pages get all five from the generator; see Docs tree.

Steps

  1. Create <name>/index.html. The URL is /<name>/.
  2. In <head>, add <link rel="canonical" href="https://machinebehavior.io/<name>/"> and a meta description.
  3. Link only with root-absolute paths: /man/, /style.css. Relative paths and links ending in .html fail the gate.
  4. Add <url><loc>https://machinebehavior.io/<name>/</loc><lastmod>YYYY-MM-DD</lastmod></url> to sitemap.xml.
  5. Add a line with the title, URL and a one-line summary to llms.txt.
  6. Put at least one ISO date on the page; the freshness check reads the newest one.
  7. Run the dry run (see Deploy pipeline), then pull, commit and push.

If a page builds links in JavaScript, set a.href in code. The gate reads href="..." in the page source, and a template string such as an interpolated href is read as a relative link. See Link check flags a template string.

Every page carries the same menu: machine behavior, man, claims, experiments, objections, terms, inside, infrastructure. Copy it from an existing page. The conformity page builds its menu from the nav list in conformity/site-tier.json.