Work log: Polymathic — March 1, 2026

What shipped today

Social sharing infrastructure verified and hardened

Started the session by verifying the OG tags and JSON-LD structured data shipped yesterday (GH-28, GH-29) against LinkedIn Post Inspector and Google Rich Results Test. Both passed with minor gaps — LinkedIn flagged a missing author meta tag, Google noted an optional missing image field in JSON-LD for posts without cover images. Fixed both: added <meta name="author"> to meta-social.html and an og-default.png fallback to the JSON-LD template.

Newsletter automation pipeline (GH-27)

Built the full newsletter send automation. A pre-commit hook now detects staged posts with newsletter.ready_to_send: true, parses the send date from frontmatter, builds the email HTML via hugo --buildFuture, and schedules a Brevo campaign via newsletter-send.sh. The hook marks sent: true in the same commit to prevent duplicate campaigns. A GitHub Actions cron triggers Cloudflare Pages rebuilds twice daily (11:00 and 15:00 UTC) so future-dated blog posts go live on schedule even without a manual push. Fixed a Python quoting bug in the hook — heredoc (<< 'PYEOF') instead of inline python3 -c "..." to avoid shell escaping nightmares.

Newsletter page redesign (GH-35)

The /newsletter/ archive page had a one-off centered layout with left-border accents that didn’t match the rest of the site. Replaced with the site’s left-aligned editorial design system — teaser-article, teaser-title, meta-date classes, teaser-separator rules between entries. Now visually consistent with the blog listing page.

Image optimization — the big one (GH-36, GH-37)

Prepped and ground GH-32 (image optimization). Decomposed it into three sequential issues. Shipped the first two:

GH-36: Deleted 1,767 orphaned images (953 MB) from static/images/ — WordPress import leftovers and unused DALL-E generations not referenced by any post, template, or config file.

GH-37: Moved remaining post images from static/images/ and content/images/ to assets/images/ and wired up Hugo’s image processing pipeline. Created a shared resolve-image.html partial that replaces duplicated 28-line image resolution blocks across four templates (single.html, post-teaser.html, meta-social.html, json-ld.html). All local cover images now served as WebP at q80 quality. Discovered that content/images/ was a WordPress import artifact causing Hugo to auto-publish all 2,098 raw images as non-page resources — removed entirely.

Result: public/images/ went from ~1.8 GB (2,100+ raw files) to 82 MB (612 processed WebPs). Individual images dropped from 3 MB to ~100 KB. Page loads should be dramatically faster, especially on mobile.

Completed

• GH-27 — Add newsletter send automation as polymathic-h hook
• GH-34 — Add newsletter send trigger to pre-commit hook
• GH-35 — Remove left border on past newsletters on /newsletter/ page
• GH-36 — Delete orphaned images from static/images/
• GH-37 — Move post images to assets/ and add Hugo image processing pipeline

Carry-over

• GH-38 — Add responsive srcset and lazy loading to all image tags (prepped, labeled ready-for-grind, depends on GH-37 which is now done)
• Share buttons on posts (from growth plan Phase 1 step 4 — no issue created yet)
• Share CTA in newsletter email template (growth plan Phase 1 step 5)
• Updated inline signup CTA copy (growth plan Phase 3)

Risks

• The image pipeline push is large (~2,400 file changes). Cloudflare Pages build should handle it but first deploy after this push may be slow. Watch for build failures.
• Hugo’s image processing generates files in resources/_gen/ which is gitignored. First build on CF will process all 300+ images from scratch — could be slow or hit memory limits.

Flags and watch-outs

• content/images/ was a WordPress artifact nobody knew about. It contained duplicates of everything in static/images/ and Hugo was silently publishing all of them. This is now cleaned up, but worth noting in case any old hardcoded /images/ paths were relying on it.
• The featured_image field on content/posts/why-customer-tools-are-organized-wrong.md contains a long text description instead of a filename. The resolve-image.html partial has a guard for this (file extension regex + 255-char limit), but the post should eventually be fixed.
• GH-32 parent issue is still open — close it once GH-38 ships.

Next session

1. Check Cloudflare Pages build succeeded after the image pipeline push — verify a post with a cover image loads correctly in production with WebP
2. /grind 38 — responsive srcset and lazy loading (already prepped, ready to go)
3. Create issue for share buttons on posts and implement — highest-leverage remaining item from growth plan
4. Tuesday: edition 12 newsletter goes out — verify the pre-commit hook automation works (first real test of GH-27)