Work log: Polymathic — March 3, 2026
What shipped today
Housekeeping and milestone closure
Closed the “Feb enhancements” milestone — all 17 issues complete. That milestone covered the full image optimization pipeline (orphan cleanup, assets migration, responsive srcset), newsletter automation, share buttons, post-commit hook optimization, and podcast artwork. Clean board now with only GH-8 (syndication) parked in April 2026.
Newsletter edition 12 confirmed and CTA copy synced
Verified that Brevo campaign 28 (“Your process was built for a different speed”) was queued and scheduled for 11am ET today. This is the first newsletter to go through the full automated pipeline after the date rescheduling fix yesterday. Also synced the newsletter signup shortcode CTA copy — it still said “Get essays like this in your inbox” while the inline partial had already been updated to “One essay a week on AI, work, and staying human.” Both now match.
RSS feed timestamp cleanup
Discovered that 35 posts had midnight timestamps (00:00:00) in their frontmatter, making the RSS feed look broken. Root-caused it to AI-generated frontmatter — when Claude creates posts, it was writing dates without meaningful times. The active paulos CLI in /Users/paul/Projects/paulos/ doesn’t have this bug (the old utilities repo did, but it’s retired). Fixed all 35 posts to 9am ET and added a frontmatter date convention to CLAUDE.md so it doesn’t recur.
Podcast artwork — Apple cache investigation
Confirmed the podcast artwork file and feed XML are both correct on our end (cream background, new filename podcast-artwork.jpg). Apple Podcasts is still showing the old black version due to CDN caching. User triggered a manual refresh via Apple Podcasts Connect. May take up to 24 hours.
Completed
- Closed “Feb enhancements” milestone (17/17)
- Newsletter CTA shortcode copy synced with inline partial
- 35 posts fixed from midnight to 9am ET timestamps
- CLAUDE.md updated with frontmatter date convention
Release progress
- Feb enhancements: Closed (17/17 complete)
- April 2026: 0/1 closed (GH-8 syndication, parked)
Carry-over
- Verify edition 12 newsletter actually delivered — check Brevo campaign 28 stats
- LinkedIn tease for edition 12 — user will handle via Zapier watching the RSS feed (Authexis social queue is the new path, not
paulos blog tease) - Apple podcast artwork propagation — may take 24 hours after the Podcasts Connect refresh
Risks
- Edition 12 was the first newsletter with a Brevo API reschedule (from 3/4 to 3/3). Confirm delivery happened correctly.
Flags and watch-outs
- LinkedIn tease distribution is moving to Zapier watching the RSS feed, not manual
paulos blog tease. This is a workflow change — previous work logs reference the old approach. - The root cause of midnight timestamps was Claude writing frontmatter, not any CLI tool. The CLAUDE.md convention should prevent recurrence, but watch for it.
- CF build speed improvement from committing
resources/_gen/(GH-41, shipped yesterday) hasn’t been verified yet. Next deploy should be significantly faster than the 15-minute builds.
Next session
- Verify edition 12 delivery stats in Brevo — confirm open rate and any bounces
- Check CF build time — has committing
resources/_gen/actually reduced deploy time? - Check Apple Podcasts for updated artwork (cream background)
- Consider branded OG default image improvement — current one works but could be more distinctive
- GH-8 (syndication) is the only open issue, parked in April — clean board otherwise
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