HODL.VN — a Vietnamese investing portal (stocks, charts, courses, AI connector) running on EmDash

[tohaitrieu]

Hi everyone,

We run HODL.VN, a Vietnamese-language investing portal, and it has been on EmDash (emdash@1.3.1, Astro 7, @astrojs/node, self-hosted in Docker) since early October 2026. Sharing what we built on top in case it is useful to others.

What the site is

• Daily stock and market analysis, with a few hundred posts so far.
• A course platform: 7 courses and 240+ lessons organised into modules, with quizzes and free/paid access.
• A community area where members publish chart ideas that other members can replay.
• Live charts and market data, served from our own data service and rendered inside EmDash pages.
• An MCP server (hodl.vn/ai) so Claude or ChatGPT can query our data and manage a user's watchlist and price alerts.

How we use EmDash

• Collections: posts, lessons and courses (with a module tree). Stock tickers are a taxonomy, so each ticker has its own landing page built from the posts tagged with it.
• Content pipeline: articles are written in Markdown and pushed through the REST API by a script that converts them to Portable Text, uploads media, sets SEO fields and schedules publishing. Several hundred posts went through it using the built-in scheduler.
• Custom plugins: four small native plugins — a paywall break block (the SSR layer cuts the body for non-members, so crawlers only see the free part), a quiz block for lessons, a callout block, and an editorial-trust plugin that shows who reviewed an article.
• Migration: we moved from WordPress with a WXR import script.

Things we learned (maybe useful)

• A PUT through the API only writes the draft. You also need POST /{id}/publish for the change to go live.
• A course reads its module tree from the published copy, so after adding or moving a module you need to publish the course again.
• With the scheduler on @astrojs/node, our scheduled posts went live reliably at the set time; we only had to make sure the schedule time is in the future when the script sets it.

We are happy to answer questions about the plugins, the Markdown to Portable Text script, or running the scheduler at this volume. Thanks to the EmDash team for a CMS that fits a content-heavy site this well.

Site: https://hodl.vn