# Mirage — SunshineFM (Case Study)
> Mirage is an ongoing case study of local AI in the Coachella Valley, anchored on a 30-day Season 1 build (Apr 1 – May 1, 2026). The Shut-down dispatched on May 1, but the project continues as documented evidence and canonical case-study material.

Status: ongoing
Last reviewed: 2026-07-26

## What this is
Mirage is a SunshineFM project that ran a 30-day, geo-fenced, anonymous social network for festival season in the Coachella Valley. The Season 1 build is the documented evidence foundation; the project continues past May 1, 2026 as an ongoing case study and research artifact for temporary social infrastructure and AI-assisted local product builds.

The /case-study page is the canonical, server-rendered case-study entry point and currently mirrors the full Season 1 wrap-up archive (/season1.html). /presentation.html is an 18-slide conference-style deck summarizing the experiment. /farewell is the post-shutdown poetic landing page served at / during the grace period.

## About
- Brand: Mirage, a SunshineFM experiment
- Operator: SunshineFM (Coachella Valley radio)
- Anchor window: 2026-04-01 to 2026-05-01 (Season 1)
- Project status: ongoing case study (continues past May 1, 2026 as documented evidence)
- Stack: Node.js + Express + PostgreSQL (Neon), hosted on Render
- Pages:
  - /case-study — canonical case-study entry point (server-rendered)
  - /case-study.html — explicit .html alias of the case study
  - /season1.html — Season 1 wrap-up archive (the underlying evidence)
  - /presentation.html — 18-slide conference-style deck
  - /eat — Restaurant Week microsite: 126 restaurants across 9 Coachella Valley cities, sourced from the DineGPS dataset; filterable by city / cuisine / price; per-card Schema.org Restaurant + Menu JSON-LD
  - /series — Coachella Valley Vertical Video Series sponsor-pitch microsite (pilot + 10 episodes), four-tier breakdown $2,000 – $10,000 per episode with a 30–50% CPM-uplift brand-integration wedge; lead-form intake at /api/series/lead backing the series_leads table
  - /farewell — poetic farewell landing page
  - / — current landing (serves /farewell during the post-shutdown grace period)
- Non-public: /app (post-creation UI, dormant), /mirage/signal (admin, gated), /archive/internal (operational appendix, robots noindex)

## Restaurant Week (/eat)
- Dataset: 126 restaurants sourced from the DineGPS dataset (data/restaurants.json), seeded into the 'restaurants' table by migrations/018_restaurant_week_seed.js.
- Coverage: 9 Coachella Valley cities — Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta, Indio, Rancho Mirage, Cathedral City, Coachella, Desert Hot Springs.
- Offer window: June 1 – June 14, 2026 (every row with an offer has the matching availabilityStarts/availabilityEnds/validFrom dates).
- Rendering model: server-rendered HTML (no client-side fetch). All 126 cards are present in the initial response — the page is fully crawlable without JS. Client-side filtering (by city / cuisine / price) is a progressive enhancement that does not require a network round trip.
- Structured data: one <script type="application/ld+json"> block per page, with @context: https://schema.org and a @graph array of 126 Restaurant nodes. Each node carries 'name', 'address' (PostalAddress with addressRegion:CA, addressCountry:US), 'servesCuisine', 'priceRange', an '@id' of form https://mirage.sunshine.fm/eat/card/<slug>, and (when the row has an offer) a 'hasMenu' tree with 'Menu' → 'MenuSection' → 'MenuItem' → 'Offer' (priceCurrency:USD, validFrom:2026-06-01, availabilityEnds:2026-06-14). Cards with a reservation link pass the OpenTable (or equivalent) URL through directly.
- Canonical: https://mirage.sunshine.fm/eat
- Per-card URL pattern: https://mirage.sunshine.fm/eat/card/<slug> (matches the '@id' on each JSON-LD node; server-rendered card page backed by the same 'restaurants' row)
- Also registered in /sitemap.xml (changefreq:weekly, priority:0.9) and surfaced in /robots.txt via the explicit AI-crawler allowlist (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, anthropic-ai, PerplexityBot).

## Vertical Video Series (/series)
- Intent: sponsor-pitch landing for the SunshineFM Coachella Valley Vertical Video Series — a pilot episode plus a 10-episode web series anchored to the Valley's two festival weekends (Coachella + Stagecoach). Audiences for this surface are brand partnerships teams and agency planners, not end-users.
- Tiers: four sponsor entry points — Silver ($2,000 / episode), Gold ($5,000 / episode, featured), Platinum ($8,000 / episode), Title Sponsor ($10,000 / episode, 1 slot per season). Renewal across the 10-episode season is the standard shape; per-episode, per-slot, and custom arrangements are negotiable.
- Brand-integration wedge: the Gold-through-Title tiers surface a 30–50% CPM-uplift brand-integration wedge — the producer-side location, talent, and post budget is already in the build, so the sponsor pays for the integration rather than the media. This is the structural reason a $2K–$10K/episode entry sits next to brand-logo mid-rolls and on-location shoots, not banner rotations.
- Pilot one-pager: "The Desert Frequency — How a 9-City Radio Station Built an AI-Native Festival Season" — vertical (9:16), 8–12 minute episodes cut for Reels / TikTok / Shorts plus a 20–30 minute long-form YouTube cut. Narrated by the operator; characters drawn from local small-business and creator roster overlapping the /eat cohort.
- Lead intake: a server-rendered <form method="POST" action="/api/series/lead"> submission. Required fields are name and email; optional fields are company, role, budget_tier (select), episode_interest (pilot / season / custom), and a free-form message. Successful POST inserts into the series_leads table (migrations/019_series_leads.js) and emails SunshineFM via Polsia's email proxy at /api/proxy/email/send; the row persists even when the proxy is unreachable, so a backlog pull from /mirage/signal or direct SQL still recovers the lead.
- Rendering model: server-rendered HTML. All copy, the four-tier cards, and the form live in the initial response — the page is fully crawlable without JavaScript. After a valid POST the route returns a 303 redirect to /series?submitted=1, which renders an inline thank-you banner server-side via the same template; missing-field or invalid-email POSTs redirect to /series?error=invalid_email or /series?error=missing_fields and render an inline alert banner.
- Structured data: one <script type="application/ld+json"> block per page, with @context: https://schema.org and a @graph array of three nodes — Organization (SunshineFM), WebPage (isPartOf: https://mirage.sunshine.fm#website), and Product (Pilot episode, category: VideoSeries, offers.lowPrice: 2000 USD, offers.highPrice: 10000 USD, offers.priceRange: "$2,000 – $10,000 per episode", availability: PreOrder, url: https://mirage.sunshine.fm/series#tiers). The JSON stringifies with the standard unicode-escape pattern so Schema.org validators don't trip on raw angle brackets.
- Canonical: https://mirage.sunshine.fm/series
- Form POST endpoint: https://mirage.sunshine.fm/api/series/lead (303 redirect to /series?submitted=1 on success)
- Also registered in /sitemap.xml (changefreq:monthly, priority:0.9) and surfaced in /robots.txt via the explicit AI-crawler allowlist (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, anthropic-ai, PerplexityBot).

## Licensing and citation
Cite as: Mirage — SunshineFM Case Study (Season 1: 2026-04-01 to 2026-05-01), mirage.sunshine.fm/case-study.

A Season 2 is plausible but not committed and is not marketed here as confirmed.