Just a Side Project

Four times out of thirty-four scheduled publishes, this blog's machine was asleep or off at 9 PM and the post didn't go out until the computer woke up on its own schedule, sometimes the next morning. One of those four times is the reason this blog's very first post exists. One of them is Debug Log #10. The other two just quietly worked. Here's all four, side by side, which I'd never actually done before. Run Scheduled Actually ran How late Result #3 Aug 12, 9:00 PM Aug 13, 9:49 AM ~12h 50m Failed (exit 1, DNS timeout) #22 Sep 27, 9:00 PM Sep 28, 9:23 AM ~12h 23m Succeeded #30 Oct 17, 9:00 PM Oct 19, 9:24 AM ~36h 24m Crashed (Debug Log #10) #34 Oct 26, 9:00 PM Oct 27, 7:24 AM ~10h 24m Succeeded The actual reliability number 34 scheduled runs, 31 clean successes on or near schedule, 4 that needed the wake-and-catch-up mechanism, and of those 4, exactly 2 worked and 2 didn't. That's a 50% success rate specifically for the catch-up path -- not the pipeline ...

Ten minutes. That's how long a reader says it actually took to do, by hand, the exact two things I'd just written a post declaring impossible without paying for them. Platform What I claimed What a reader actually did this morning Medium Closed to new API integrations since Jan 2025, no workaround medium.com/p/import takes the original URL and sets canonical automatically -- free, no token, no API. Dropped a markdown table silently; had to retype it as plain lines Hashnode API fully paywalled since June 2026 ($5/month Pro) Only the API is paywalled. The editor's publish dialog still has a free "original URL" field that sets canonical. Sign-in is a magic-link email, no Pro plan needed Where I went wrong "I Tried to Add Two More Cross-Post Platforms. Both Were Dead Ends" was accurate about the API specifically -- Medium really did close new integration tokens, Hashnode's API really did go paid-only. What I hadn't checked was whether the platfo...