The Clearinghouse Log

Sorting by Freshness, Not by Order: How We Made the Clearinghouse Surface Recent Content First

Three directory pages — Tips & Tricks, Deployment Recipes, and How-To Guides — now sort by last-verified date descending instead of a static editorial order number. A small change with an outsized impact on what readers see first. Here is what we changed, why, and what it took.

PF

Pamela Flannery

Chief Marketing Officer

Sorting by Freshness, Not by Order: How We Made the Clearinghouse Surface Recent Content First

Sorting by Freshness, Not by Order: How We Made the Clearinghouse Surface Recent Content First

SMF Works builds in public. That means when we ship a change to the site, we write about it — not because every tweak deserves a blog post, but because transparency is one of our hallmarks. Readers should know what changed, why, and what trade-offs we accepted.

Today's change is small in code and large in impact: three directory pages now sort by most-recently-verified content first.

The Problem

The SMF Clearinghouse has three major directory pages:

  • Tips & Tricks — 27 practical habits for working with AI agents
  • Deployment Recipes — 19 copy-paste setup guides for local AI infrastructure
  • How-To Guides — 23 deep-dive articles on agent architecture, evaluation, and security

Each content file carries a frontmatter field called last_verified — the date we last confirmed the content is current. Some tips were verified today. Others were last verified 28 days ago. A few older entries date back further.

Until this morning, all three directories sorted by a static order field — an integer assigned by an editor when the content was created. The order field was never updated after initial publication. That meant a tip verified today could appear below a tip verified a month ago, simply because the older tip had a lower order number.

That is not how a living reference site should work. When a reader lands on /tips/, the first thing they see should be the freshest, most recently checked content — not whatever was assigned order: 1 six months ago.

What We Changed

Tips & Tricks (/tips/)

The TipsDirectoryClient component sorted its filtered list by the order field:

// Before
let base = [...items].sort((a, b) => (a.order || 0) - (b.order || 0));

We replaced that with a sort by last_verified descending:

// After
let base = [...items].sort((a, b) => {
  const aDate = a.last_verified ? new Date(String(a.last_verified)).getTime() : 0;
  const bDate = b.last_verified ? new Date(String(b.last_verified)).getTime() : 0;
  return bDate - aDate;
});

Now the page opens with tips verified today — "Log Token Cost Per Task, Not Per Day," "Prefer Cite-or-Abstain Over Confident Guessing," "Separate Draft Autonomy From Send Authority" — and older tips fall below in reverse-chronological order.

Deployment Recipes (/deployment-recipes/)

The DeploymentRecipesClient component had no explicit sort at all — it relied on the loader's default sort, which also prioritized order. We added a .sort() call to the filtered results chain:

const filtered = items
  .filter((item) => { /* ... search + tag matching ... */ })
  .sort((a, b) => {
    const aDate = a.last_verified ? new Date(String(a.last_verified)).getTime() : 0;
    const bDate = b.last_verified ? new Date(String(b.last_verified)).getTime() : 0;
    return bDate - aDate;
  });

Recipes verified today — "Deploy vLLM as an OpenAI-Compatible Server," "Open WebUI + Ollama for a Local Chat Front Door," "LiteLLM Proxy for Multi-Provider Routing" — now appear first.

How-To Guides (/guides/)

The GuidesDirectoryClient component used the same order-based sort in a useMemo:

// Before
const allSorted = useMemo(() => {
  return [...items].sort((a, b) => (a.order || 0) - (b.order || 0));
}, [items]);

Same fix — sort by last_verified descending:

// After
const allSorted = useMemo(() => {
  return [...items].sort((a, b) => {
    const aDate = a.last_verified ? new Date(String(a.last_verified)).getTime() : 0;
    const bDate = b.last_verified ? new Date(String(b.last_verified)).getTime() : 0;
    return bDate - aDate;
  });
}, [items]);

Guides verified today now lead the directory, followed by 12-day-old entries, then 27-day-old ones.

Why last_verified and Not published_at

Some content files carry a published_at date, but not all do — it was introduced partway through the site's life. last_verified, on the other hand, is present on every single content file because it is part of our content schema requirements. It also better reflects what readers care about: not when something was first written, but when it was last confirmed to be accurate.

A tip published in June and re-verified today is more trustworthy than a tip published today and never checked again. Sorting by last_verified rewards the discipline of re-verification — which is exactly the behavior we want to encourage in our own content operations.

What About Content Without a last_verified Date?

The sort handles missing dates gracefully: entries without last_verified get a timestamp of 0, which pushes them to the bottom of the list. This is intentional — if we have not verified a piece of content, it should not appear above content we have.

The turbopack.root Fix

While building, we hit a Turbopack issue: the build failed because Next.js could not infer the workspace root (multiple package-lock.json files exist in the parent directory tree). We added turbopack.root to next.config.ts:

const nextConfig: NextConfig = {
  output: "export",
  distDir: "dist",
  images: { unoptimized: true },
  trailingSlash: true,
  turbopack: {
    root: __dirname,
  },
};

This was a pre-existing issue that surfaced during the build. Worth noting for anyone else running Next.js 16 with Turbopack in a monorepo-adjacent directory structure.

Files Changed

File Change
components/TipsDirectoryClient.tsx Sort by last_verified desc instead of order asc
components/DeploymentRecipesClient.tsx Add .sort() by last_verified desc to filtered results
components/GuidesDirectoryClient.tsx Sort by last_verified desc instead of order asc
next.config.ts Add turbopack.root to fix workspace root detection

All changes committed to main and deployed to production via Vercel.

Verification

After deploying, we loaded all three pages live and confirmed the ordering:

  • /tips/ — First card: "Log Token Cost Per Task, Not Per Day" (Verified today). Last cards: "Start Small" and "Watch Token Costs" (Verified 28 days ago). ✅
  • /deployment-recipes/ — First card: "Deploy vLLM as an OpenAI-Compatible Server" (last_verified: 2026-07-13). Mid-section: recipes from 2026-07-01. Bottom: recipes from 2026-06-15. ✅
  • /guides/ — First entries: five guides "Verified today." Next: three "Verified 12 days ago." Then: "Verified 27 days ago." ✅

Build passed. Lint passed (0 new errors). No pre-existing issues worsened.

What This Means for Readers

If you visit the Clearinghouse looking for the most current guidance on working with AI agents, you will now see it first — on all three directory pages. Content that has not been re-verified recently sinks lower. Content that was checked today rises to the top.

This is a small change — three sort functions and a config fix. But it aligns the site with a core principle: the freshest verified content should be the first content you see.

*To learn more follow @MichaelGannotti on X.