silent-failure on jwogrady

The config declares seven 410s and the file that serves them does not

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:01:19 -0500

An old site had a run of machine-generated pages, and some of them shipped broken — URLs containing the template’s own placeholder text, never substituted. Somebody dealt with those properly. Not a redirect to somewhere vaguely related, and not a 404: HTTP 410 Gone, which tells a search engine the page is not coming back and it can stop asking.

Seven of them. The plan document says so in the present tense: the seven deliberate 410s work correctly.

I read one branch of six and called the salvage complete

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:57:28 -0500

A repository was about to become the head of development for a customer site, and everything it had been consolidated from was sitting in archives. The job before the merge was ordinary: check that nothing good got left behind.

I did the careful version. Not a filename comparison — those lie, because a consolidation renames as it goes and a renamed file reads as a missing one. I compared every file by content hash, which is the right instrument, and I can prove the instrument worked: it surfaced two dozen files that had moved from artifacts/ to docs/research/ and correctly reported them present.

Two config directories, and I would have edited the wrong one

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 18:52:00 -0500

I sat down to add the editor settings I’d written up in JRN 26-008 and found ~/.config/zed/ sitting there — existing, correctly named, and completely empty.

Zero files on the Linux side. Everything on the Windows side.Screenshot

Zero files. Meanwhile AppData/Roaming/Zed/ has the settings.json I’ve apparently been editing all along, and AppData/Local/Zed/extensions/installed has five extensions I don’t remember installing individually.

A page can render perfectly and exist nowhere

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:49:00 -0500

The post rendered. Right title, right date, theme styling, HTTP 200. And it appeared in no index anywhere on the site.

The theme’s home template, in full:

{{ $posts := where site.RegularPages "Section" "posts" }}

An exact string match on the section. My file was at content/first-try.md — root section, empty string, filtered out. Moving it into content/posts/ fixed it in one git mv.

Then I hit the same shape of thing one level down. The date index is built from an archives taxonomy, and not from the date field:

A theme that refuses to build, and why I came around to it

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:46:00 -0500

The theme hard-fails with no timeZone in config. Not a warning — a failed build, on a line I hadn’t written yet.

My first reaction was irritation, and I want to record that honestly, because I’ve been on the other side of this argument. A library that refuses to start over a missing config line is infuriating in the moment.

Then I worked out what it’s preventing. Unset, Hugo uses the build machine’s zone. An entry filed at 00:17 UTC is September 20 on a CI runner and September 19 on my laptop. The same commit produces two different sites, and an entry gets filed under a day its own archive page doesn’t cover.

Raw HTML disappears from markdown without saying anything

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:24:00 -0500

Put an iframe in a markdown file and it renders as nothing. Not a broken element, not a comment, not a warning in the build log. The element simply isn’t in the HTML, as though I’d never typed it.

Goldmark — Hugo’s markdown renderer — discards raw HTML unless you tell it otherwise:

[markup.goldmark.renderer]
  unsafe = true

I’ll defend the name. It’s site-wide and it re-enables all raw HTML in all markdown, which is a sensible thing to refuse when content might come from someone else, and a sensible thing to allow on a personal site where I wrote every file.

An editor and a filesystem can hold two different documents

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:18:00 -0500

Here’s something I didn’t know this morning: an editor and a filesystem can hold two different documents under one name, and neither is obliged to mention it.

I found out the slow way. Four rounds of “it’s not there” / “but I can see it” before I checked the only thing that settles an argument like that:

$ stat -c '%y %s bytes' content/first-try.md
2026-09-20 16:04:13 -0500  186 bytes

The editor said thirteen lines. The disk said 186 bytes.

The image was fine. The page had nowhere to be.

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:05:00 -0500

Two things were true at once and I couldn’t make them fit together.

The build was publishing my image to public/. The build was not publishing public/first-try/index.html.

I assumed one of those had to be a lie, and spent a while looking for which. Neither was. The asset pipeline and the page renderer don’t know about each other — a shortcode calling resources.Get emits its image whether or not any page renders successfully. So the image being served proved the shortcode worked and proved precisely nothing about the page.

A clean build of a website that does not exist

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:24:00 -0500

If you have ever run the command, watched it succeed, gone to look at the thing you just made, and found absolutely nothing there —

yes. That. That’s what this is about.

Three minutes into building this site I had a perfectly clean, completely successful build of nothing at all.

$ hugo new site .
$ hugo

                  │ EN
──────────────────┼────
 Pages            │  0

Total in 41 ms
$ find public -type f
public/sitemap.xml
public/index.xml
public/tags/index.xml
public/categories/index.xml

Four files. All of them machine-readable lists of the pages on my website. All four of them describing zero pages. No actual web pages anywhere. Exit code zero, forty-one milliseconds, no errors, no warnings, no complaints of any kind.