Work log: Polymathic — March 12, 2026
What shipped today
A massive cleanup and infrastructure day for the blog. Nine issues closed in a single session, clearing the entire March 2026 milestone and leaving the issue queue nearly empty.
The biggest structural change was the podcast player refactor. Hardcoded audio player HTML was stripped from all 55 podcast posts (#105) after moving the player to a template-level component in single.html (#104). This means podcast posts are now pure markdown — the audio player renders automatically from frontmatter fields (audio_url, duration, file_size). A follow-up issue exists in paulos (#394) to update paulos podcast generate-audio so it stops injecting HTML into post content going forward.
The newsletter archive page (#106) got a significant template rewrite. The old approach sorted by post date, which broke when existing essays were repurposed as newsletters (edition 14 was an essay dated February 2 that got sent as a newsletter on March 10). The new template sorts by edition number and groups multi-article editions (editions 1-6 had multiple posts per edition) into collapsed entries instead of showing duplicate rows.
The rest was scout-generated cleanup: dead search JavaScript removed from baseof.html (#95), Bluesky and Mastodon added to JSON-LD sameAs (#96), stale newsletter HTML templates deleted (#97), footer contact info moved to hugo.toml params (#98), 10 posts with invalid content_type values fixed (#99), and a Procfile.dev added for consistent dev server flags (#110).
Completed
- #94 — Fix 9 posts with invalid content_type values
- #95 — Remove dead search JavaScript from baseof.html
- #96 — Add Bluesky and Mastodon to JSON-LD sameAs array
- #97 — Remove 3 stale newsletter HTML templates from repo root
- #98 — Footer still hardcodes contact info instead of using hugo.toml params
- #104 — Add template-level audio player to single.html
- #105 — Strip hardcoded audio player HTML from all podcast posts
- #106 — Newsletter archive ordering fix
- #110 — Add Procfile.dev with –buildFuture –buildDrafts flags for dev server
Release progress
- March 2026: 7/7 closed — milestone complete, ready to close
- April 2026: 2/3 closed (1 open: #8 syndicated content, backlogged)
Carry-over
- Close the March 2026 milestone (all issues done)
- Verify security headers live:
curl -I https://www.paulwelty.com/ - Verify AI-DIVE talk post links after deploy
- Check edition 13+14 delivery stats in Brevo
- Update Brevo sender name to “Philosopher at Large”
Risks
- paulos#394 (stop injecting HTML in
paulos podcast generate-audio) is still open — any new podcast posts created before that lands will still get hardcoded HTML injected, requiring manual cleanup
Flags and watch-outs
- The March milestone is fully closed but the milestone itself hasn’t been closed on GitHub yet
- Only 2 open issues remain (#8 backlogged, #79 backlogged) — queue is nearly empty, good time for a
/scoutrun or/featureplanning
Next session
/milestone close "March 2026"to close the completed milestone- Run
/scout --autoto replenish the issue queue - Consider
/featurefor the audio/podcast rethink (removing hardcoded HTML from the generation pipeline entirely) - Check Brevo for edition 13+14 stats and update sender name
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