Deploy Notes 08.30.2026

Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Category: Deploy Notes

Published On: August 31, 2026

💧 The Droplets

Routine maintenance - packages updated, reboots applied. The weekly runbook itself got two changes worth noting, though. First, if a droplet arrives with a reboot already pending from an unattended kernel update, it now gets rebooted before the upgrade runs, so a bad kernel shows up at the start of the window instead of the end. Second, the deploy checklist no longer has me type the release tag by hand. It derives the newest tag from main instead, after the hand-typed version quietly checked out the previous release twice this summer.

🎬 They Said It! - v2026.8.5 - theysaidit.app

This was an SEO and housekeeping release. Genre names on movie pages and cards are now links to the genre's browse page, and the sitemap finally advertises the browse index and all 18 genre pages - it had been quietly missing them for months while every check said "valid XML, looks fine." The About and Contact pages had a similar invisible bug: a stray quote mark was severing their meta descriptions mid-sentence, so search results were showing half a description. Both fixed. The home page title also grew a descriptive tail, since "They Said It!" alone tells a searcher nothing about movies.

Search counting got an overhaul too. Searches are now only recorded when a real browser runs the page, which means crawlers no longer pollute the "popular searches" list or the admin's content-gap panel. Crawler traffic is still written to its own log so I can see who's visiting, and robots.txt now states a policy out loud: search engines and AI assistants that link back are welcome, AI training crawlers and SEO scrapers are not. On the admin side, movies can now be pinned to a specific TMDB ID, which exists because Seven (1995) had been wearing a still from an obscure French film called Seven Sundays for weeks. TMDB files it as Se7en, and no title search was ever going to find that.

🧙 Accumulated Knowledge - v2026.8.5 - accumulatedknowledge.app

The Bracket filter on the profile pages is now a multi-select with a new Unbracketed option. You can finally ask "how do I do across Brackets 2 and 3" instead of checking one at a time, and the Unbracketed option matters more than it sounds - the large majority of logged Commander matches never had a bracket set, and until now picking any bracket silently dropped all of them. Each selected bracket gets its own removable chip, and the chips show real names ("Bracket 5: cEDH") instead of internal slugs.

Sharing links got nicer as well. Deck pages now show their own Scryfall card art in link previews instead of one generic site image, and every deck page carries a real description for search results rather than a six-word stub. The site-wide fallback preview card is a proper designed 1200x630 image now, shipped with the site's own assets. The old one was a screenshot of the home page hosted on Google Drive, and a Drive sharing setting was one click away from breaking every link preview on the site.