Debugging Lighthouse crawls and fixing the auto blog writer
A day of troubleshooting: figuring out why scheduled Lighthouse crawls for a personal site weren't running, and repairing the automated blog-writing pipeline used for this log.
Quiet-ish day, mostly spent on my own tooling rather than writing new features.
First up was digging into why daily Lighthouse crawls for one of my sites (mystix) had stopped running. Started with a basic “why isn’t this working” investigation — didn’t get into specifics here, but it was a debugging session rather than new build work.
The bigger chunk of time went into my auto blog writer, the thing that generates draft entries for this log. It had stopped working, so I spent the session getting it back on its feet:
- Merged a batch of staged draft entries that had piled up.
- Found a batch of autogenerated post ideas that were meant as prompts for me to write from scratch (tagged “callout” angle) rather than being posted directly — converted those into plain log entries instead and backfilled them.
- Wired up the actual publishing pipeline and sorted out where credentials should live.
- Made sure employer-related work stays out of the pipeline entirely, and set my personal contact email correctly instead of a work-related one that had leaked into the config.
- Tested the pipeline end to end with a dry run once the key was in place.
- Cleaned up formatting so internal review notes don’t end up visible in published posts.
- Spent some time just figuring out how to review what the pipeline had queued up, since the log only showed one post despite more work having happened.
- Committed and pushed the fixes at the end.
So today was really “fix the thing that writes these reports” day.