Local & civic
The village portal for Mainz-Ebersheim — new every morning, with a podcast.
ebersheim.de is the village portal for Ebersheim, a district in the south of Mainz. Since summer 2026 I have been turning it from a static club page into a portal that updates itself every morning — and makes transparent what a machine writes and what a human decides.
Behind the site are more than 20,000 lines of code and over 200 changes since the summer. The rule: no number, date or name is published that is not in the sources. Better no episode than a wrong one.
What we built there
Every item can be seen on the live site. Links go straight to the page on ebersheim.de (in German).
According to “So entsteht ebersheim.de”
Daily overview rebuilt every night Monday to Saturday: clubs, city and police notices, weather, traffic, events, football and bin dates — written under a fact guard.
A two-voice episode of two to three minutes Monday to Saturday, with a weekly review on Sunday. Chapter marks, a cover per episode and a guard against invented facts before speech synthesis.
Subscribe via Spotify, Amazon Music, Deezer, Podcast Index or RSS — as plain text links without tracking.
Local business tips, “new on the notice board” for fresh classifieds, house notices with guaranteed airtime and TSV football results from the FuPa API.
A box on the homepage and a line under every post and episode — the daily overview goes straight to the phone.
A daily video and post for each episode on the portal’s channels.
A public explanation of which sources are read and how a club gets included.
A nightly merge of both parishes’ newsletters, wine events from openwein.de, council meetings, the youth café and posters — plus an upcoming-events sidebar.
An iCal feed for Google, iPhone/Mac and Outlook, prominent above the calendar and in the sidebar.
Every meeting in plain language: two sentences per agenda item from the official PDFs, checked by a human before they appear — every meeting of the term and the next date.
The planned housing areas with planning status and official documents.
New pages for parties, the summer camp, Agenda 21, the repair café and the youth centre, plus 17 club pages rewritten from the clubs’ own sources.
What is open today — post office, recycling centre, wine taverns — plus today’s events and the bin calendar. Loaded live via REST so the page cache never freezes “today”.
Real-time departures of lines 66 and 67 with service alerts, as a widget on every page — the Abfahrtstafel plugin.
Bus stops, playgrounds, kindergartens, school, doctors, churches, sports grounds and places to eat. Self-hosted Leaflet; map tiles load only after a click — privacy first.
Practices, pharmacy, care services, emergency numbers and the nearest emergency departments on one page.
The four kindergartens, rewritten from official sources (the old page dated from 2011), with how to register.
Members of the local business association, imported weekly, plus further researched businesses — grouped by trade.
Free and without an account, every ad moderated, no phone field — contact via a relay form. Ads run for 30 days.
18 wineries, pulled weekly from openwein.de.
Season and opening hours as the wineries publish them.
Festivals within 25 km, refreshed daily from openwein.de.
Dryness and climate trends, computed daily from German Weather Service station data.
Nine weather services forecast for Ebersheim and are scored afterwards; the podcast reads out the median.
Private offers free of charge, agents deliver via OpenImmo into an SFTP inbox, contact through a relay form. The portal does not broker and takes no commission — the Estatequay plugin.
A read-only MCP server makes the listings searchable for AI assistants.
Sources, the nightly chain, the checks — and what the AI writes and what humans decide.
A public dashboard of every automatic job with last run, result and next run — even when something is red.
A silver lattice on a red tile — deliberately not an official coat of arms, generated and used as the favicon.
Site mail passes SPF and DMARC, and every address reaches the canonical www host in exactly one redirect.
30 · ebersheim.de
Live departures of one stop as a WordPress widget.
Shows departures of one bus or tram stop with real-time delays and service alerts from an EFA journey planner. Visitors never reach the planner directly: the site fetches and caches. In use on ebersheim.de as “Bus ab Neugasse”.
Open-source real-estate plugin for WordPress, free to download.
Imports listings from agents’ software via OpenImmo over per-agent SFTP inboxes and Spanish feeds via Kyero v3, takes private offers and forwards enquiries through a relay form that stores nothing. Legal requirements such as the energy certificate are enforced.
The common thread through Mainz’s 15 district councils.
Harvests every district-council meeting from the city’s public council information system — 230 meetings and almost 4,000 agenda items in the current term — classifies topics and shows which questions were answered and which were not.