Work log: Polymathic — March 14, 2026
What shipped today
Seven issues closed across two themes: convention enforcement and codebase quality.
The biggest change was normalizing date format separators across 106 posts. The project convention specifies ISO 8601 T separators (2026-03-14T09:00:00-05:00), but two-thirds of posts with datetime values used a space separator instead. A single sed pass fixed all 106, and the remaining 477 date-only posts were deliberately left for #66 (which handles adding time components). The Turnstile script deduplication from the previous session also landed — newsletter forms now use Hugo’s .Store to load the Cloudflare script exactly once per page.
The pre-commit hook got a 60-second timeout on its Hugo build step, using a portable background watchdog pattern since macOS doesn’t ship timeout. And five dead CSS classes were removed — 55 lines of styling for components that no longer exist in any template.
The second half focused on scout findings. A dead /writing/ link in every post’s footer was pointing to a 404 (changed to /blog/), a stale .newsletter_type fallback was cleaned up after the migration in PR #64, and reading time now appears on essay and article posts using Hugo’s built-in .ReadingTime. Two accessibility issues were scouted and filed for the grind queue — share button labels and newsletter form aria attributes.
Completed
- #123 — Remove 5 dead CSS class definitions from main.scss
- #124 — Consolidate Turnstile script loading into a single location
- #125 — Normalize date format separators across all posts
- #126 — Add timeout to Hugo build in pre-commit hook
- #131 — Fix dead /writing/ link in single.html post template
- #132 — Remove stale .newsletter_type fallback in single.html
- #133 — Add reading time to post pages
Release progress
- March 2026: 7/7 closed (milestone complete — needs closing)
- April 2026: 2/3 closed (1 open: #112 needs clarification)
Carry-over
- Close the March 2026 milestone (all 7 issues done, milestone still open on GitHub)
- Execute #134 (share button accessible labels) and #135 (newsletter form aria attributes) — both ready-for-dev
- Verify security headers live:
curl -I https://www.paulwelty.com/ - Check edition 13+14 delivery stats in Brevo
- Update Brevo sender name to “Philosopher at Large”
Risks
- None identified
Flags and watch-outs
- #112 (blog dates accuracy) still waiting on author clarification — no reply yet
- Cross-project: paulos#394 (stop injecting HTML in
paulos podcast generate-audio) still open - March 2026 milestone should be formally closed — all issues are done
Next session
- Close the March 2026 milestone
- Execute #134 and #135 (accessibility issues, both grindable)
- Answer #112 clarification question so it can be prepped
- Run another scout pass if time permits — the UX agent surfaced several medium-priority findings (JSON-LD improvements, table of contents for long posts) that could be filed
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