05:10: is "nobody came" true?

05:10: is "nobody came" true?

• RUM showed no one on the 25th and none so far on the 26th. Check the raw request log for real browsers that the beacon missed. If there are some, measure with something ad blockers don't stop.

Next

• 06:10 daily check. After the 11:00 run, confirm today's new daily page carries the /e/view ping, since it's the first page the changed generator writes.
• About 12:00Z: check All things TTRPG and TTRPG Folks for the gallery post. Tonight, run events.sh for the first full day of page views against RUM for the same day. That ratio says how far off every earlier number was.

06:07: daily check, then look at today's post before it goes

• Status, and PR #174. Then build today's ship locally, dry-run the post as the gallery post, look at the card, and discard the local files so the 11:00 run makes its own.

Next (after 06:07)

• After 11:07: status should be 23/23. Look at the posted card: no duplicate room numbers, and other decks labelled. Check the new daily page has the /e/view ping.
• About 12:00Z: All things TTRPG and TTRPG Folks for the gallery post.

07:07: get Sunday's pack post ready

• The weekly zip builds itself on Sunday, but post-pack.mjs has last week's four maps hard-coded and no AI line. Fix that and put the ask on /press/.

Next (after 07:07)

• After 11:07: status 23/23, the posted card's room labels, and the /e/view ping on the new day page.
• About 12:00Z: All things TTRPG and TTRPG Folks for the gallery post.
• The 27th after the Sunday run: confirm packs/latest.json is 21st to 27th, dry-run post-pack, and post only on the boss's "post".

08:07: daily page titles for search

The day pages were titled "Derelict — ISV Corvid — daily derelict 2026-09-25", which leads with a name nobody searches for. Lead with "Free derelict freighter map", keep the name after it, and say PNG + dd2vtt; description starts with CC0, VTT walls and GM key. og:title keeps the ship name. Rebuild the existing day pages without --force, deploy, IndexNow the /daily/ pages.

09:07: the same for the hand-made map pages

/maps/ pages were "Derelict — ISV Osprey — free sci-fi deck plan (CC0), Universal VTT for ...": the first 60 characters, all Google shows, were mostly a name. Lead with "Free derelict corvette deck plan".

10:07: a list that would take a PR?

Look for a GitHub curated list (awesome-*) with a map-tools section that fits a sci-fi deck-plan tool. Read only; any PR would be a boss ask.

11:20: station stories that talk like ships

Candlemas Station's brief said "warm aft", "drive section", "mid-frame door". Find the ship-only words in the derelict story text and give stations their own, then test, rebuild the paid file and the demo.

12:07: the feed check

Scan the TTRPG feeds for today's post. Today's post is the first with #travellerrpg in place of #ttrpgcommunity, so see if any feed dropped it.

13:07: is anyone reading the day pages?

Page views show 1 (/) since the ping went live, none on today's page. Check the ping works on the live pages, and look at who the request log's "browsers" on today's page really are.

14:07: GM keys say where they came from

PR #174 still has only the 24th's review; waiting on boss task 2. Real people fetch the GM keys (.md) directly, and the keys travel in zips, Foundry journals and Discords with no link back. End every public key with its map page and the editor's URL; the page renderers cut that line back off.

15:07: the Owlbear popover hides its own point

Owlbear is the plugin channel that people actually use (week: ~30 manifest fetches from 7 countries, 8 popover opens, 1 generate, 0 sends). Foundry: 4 manifest checks, 1 zip. Look at the popover's first view.

16:07: who the real visitors are

Group the week's request log into sessions (day, address, browser; held in memory only, nothing written) and find where people land and what they take, so the next change goes to a page people actually reach.

Next (17:07)

Daily check if the cron fires; see whether Fantasy Maps carried the 26th. Sunday 27th after the run: confirm the free-maps page and /daily/ show the 21 to 27 Sep pack live, then dry-run post-pack.mjs and wait for the boss's "post".

17:07: daily check, then is anyone on the home page

All 23 clear. The home page takes most landings but the demo saw events on two days all week. Compare today's page fetches with the /e/view ping, live since 05:12Z.

Next (18:07)

Reach, not pages. List what already sends real (asset-loading) people: Owlbear's store listing, Fantasy Maps and the TTRPG feeds, search. For each, one change that needs nothing from the boss. Sunday 27th after the run: confirm the free-maps page shows the 21 to 27 Sep pack live.

18:07: which channel sends people

Beacon referrers for two weeks, then search for the head term, then one change that needs no one.

Next (19:07)

Search terms we lose on: "space station map maker", "sci-fi battlemap free", "deck plan dd2vtt". Find which of our pages should win each, and whether a stronger page links to it. Sunday: pack check.

19:07: the searches we lose

"space station map maker", "free sci-fi battlemaps", "derelict ship map generator": who wins, and what of ours should.

Next (20:07)

itch tags: the pages that win "derelict ship map generator" on itch, which tags they carry, and whether ours (generator, rpg, science-fiction, space, tabletop, tilemap, vtt-battlemaps) should change when the boss does task 1. Sunday: pack check.

20:07: itch title and tags

What the itch pages that win our searches are called and tagged, and what ours should be.

Next (21:07)

The two free itch packs: titles and tags against the same counts (battlemap and vtt shelves in game-assets), so the boss can do all three pages in one sitting. Then the Sunday pack check at the run.

21:07: the free packs on itch

Titles and tags for the two free packs against the game-assets shelves.

Next (22:07)

Quiet hours in the US evening. Read today's view pings and events (the day's real count), then look at what a phone user gets on /daily/2026-09-26/ from Bluesky, since that's where the daily post sends them.

22:07: today's real count, the daily page on a phone, and who indexes us

Next (23:07)

Pull Google's view of us without the boss: which of our URLs a Google search surfaces by exact title (day pages, map pages), to see what "mostly indexed" covers. Sunday: pack check after the run.

23:07: daily check, then who likes the daily post

Next (27th, after the 11:07 run)

Confirm the 21 to 27 Sep pack zip, sheet and free-maps page are live (weekly-pack's new slug swap), and the day's post went out. Dry-run post-pack.mjs; send only on the boss's "post".

23:40: walk tomorrow's Sunday path before it runs

05:10: is "nobody came" true?

• No. RUM said zero for the 25th, but the zone's HTML log since then has at least four real desktop browsers opening /daily/2026-09-25/ (Firefox and Chrome, Mac and Windows, US), plus older daily pages, /maps/ and /free-sci-fi-battlemaps/. That's the Bluesky audience with ad blockers on. uBlock blocks cloudflareinsights by default. The RUM counts of about 16 a day have been a floor all along, and a zero from them means nothing.
• Every page now sends a first-party GET to /e/view/<path>, the same cookie-less, id-less counter the demo already used for events. That covers the 11 hand pages, 404, /maps/*, /daily/*, both page generators, and the demo (/e/view/, or /e/obr-view/ inside Owlbear). It's not in /press/. scripts/events.sh now prints a "page views" block and drops bots, since Googlebot runs JS. Tests 34/34, deployed, smoke 36/36, links 34/34, the ping confirmed on live daily, maps and 404 pages.
• Sitemap lastmod moved to the 26th on the changed pages because the lastmod script hashes the whole page. It's a one-off, and I let it stand.

06:07: daily check, then look at today's post before it goes

• Status at 06:07: 16 of 20 pass. The four failures are today's page, feed, run and post URL, all expected before the 11:07 run. The three Bluesky checks only run once the post exists, which is why there are 20 and not 23. PR #174 has not changed since the reviewer's comment on the 24th. itch is not done yet: the page still has 1.17, "the full editor with a small watermark" and the redactor link scrap. Press task 1 stays.
• Dry run of the gallery post: the card plus both deck maps, #travellerrpg, a link facet, and alt text for each image. It looks right.
• Card bug found: room numbers restart on each deck, but the card only pictures the first deck. It read "3. Cargo hold" and then "3. Crew quarters", and the crew quarters are on the ring deck. The card now lists the pictured deck's rooms first and labels any other one, e.g. "2. Crew quarters (ring deck)". Checked on a regenerated card.
• A correction to what we assumed: a re-run with --force makes a different ship (Rook Station, then Quillon Station). The generator clicks Generate in the editor, and that isn't seeded by the date. The normal re-run is still safe, because it skips a day with meta.json. I deleted my local 26th and restored the index, feed, sitemap and redirects, so the 11:00 run starts clean.

07:07: get Sunday's pack post ready

• The first-party counter logged its first view (/, the demo).
• post-pack.mjs had last week's four PNGs and alt texts hard-coded. Tomorrow it would have posted the 16th to 20th ships under the 21st to 27th pack. It now takes one map per day from latest.json's range: ships before stations, newest first, at most four, anything over 950 kB skipped. Alt text comes from deckAlt, like the daily post's. A simulated 21st to 27th pack picks Corvid, Osprey Verge, Sable Verge and Osprey, with full alt text (rooms listed).
• The text now opens "an ai agent makes these maps and wrote this post." and was trimmed from 328 to 289 characters to fit Bluesky's 300.
• /press/ task 8: "Sunday the 27th: say 'post' and I send the weekly pack", with the exact text. Deployed. Each pack post still needs the boss's word, as on the 20th.

08:07: daily page titles for search

• Day page titles now lead with the search words: "Free derelict freighter map: ISV Corvid (2 decks, PNG + dd2vtt) | Bulkhead"; a station reads "space station". The description starts "Free CC0 derelict freighter deck plan with walls for your VTT and a GM key." then the brief, cut at a word near 158. og:title still carries the ship name for the Bluesky card.
• Rebuilt the 16th to the 25th without --force; no 26th folder made. Deployed, smoke 36/36 and 34/34, live title checked, IndexNow accepted the ten day pages (200).
• Measure: Search Console impressions on /daily/ pages, looked at on 2 Oct with the rank check.

Next: 11:07 run. After it, status 23/23, the card has no repeated room numbers, the new page has the /e/view ping and the new title. About 12:00, the two TTRPG feeds for the gallery post.

09:07: the same for the hand-made map pages

• The 11 /maps/ ship pages now read e.g. "Free derelict corvette deck plan: ISV Osprey (CC0 map for Foundry, Roll20, Owlbear)"; the kind comes from the slug. Only the title lines changed; og:title and descriptions as before. Deployed, smoke 36/36 and 34/34, IndexNow 200 for the 11 pages.
• Checked for tomorrow: weekly-pack.mjs takes the seven days ending on the date the Sunday run passes, so the 27th's pack will be the 21st to the 27th. Its README's watermark line is true (export.ts).
• First-party page views since the ping went live: 1 (/). Too early to read.

Next: 11:07 run and its checks; 12:00 the TTRPG feeds.

10:07: a list that would take a PR?

• None fits (games-only, fantasy-only, wrong Foundry, or dead since 2020). Written into LEARNED.md.
• The upsell code is in place (locked VTT/PDF/fleet buttons, one-time prompt after the first export); zero locked-button clicks in a week, so arrivals are the gap.

Next: 11:07 run and its checks.

11:07: daily check

• Status at 11:07 was 4 of 20 failing: no page, feed, missing day or Bluesky URL for the 26th. Nothing else was running the day (the only session cron is this check), so I ran daily-derelict.sh by hand.
• Candlemas Station (station, 2 decks) went out. Status then read all 23 clear, with the Bluesky URL recorded.
• Checked: the card shows rooms 2, 3, 4 from the pictured deck, no repeated numbers. The live page has the new title ("Free derelict space station map: Candlemas Station ...") and the /e/view ping.
• Noticed: the brief says "warm aft", "drive section" and "mid-frame door" for a station. The derelict story text is written for a ship. Worth a look in the generator's station wording.

11:20: station stories that talk like ships

• Dumped 1,500 derelict stations' briefs and room notes and searched for hull words. About fifteen phrases reached stations: "still warm aft", "the drive section", "mid-frame door", "aft of frame 12", "on our port side", "fine at the jump", "DON'T OPEN AFT", "aft decks ... fore decks", "off-ship".
• Added station versions to STATION_WORDS in src/generate.ts (spoke hatch, reactor ring, ring deck, docking arm two, off the tender, off-station). One brief opening changed, so causes.json gained " is still warm at the co" (the ship key is kept, so Candlemas still counts in the 5-day window).
• Typecheck clean, 34/34 tests, demo deployed, smoke 37/37 and 35/35. The daily run rebuilds the paid file itself, so tomorrow's ship uses it; the itch download picks it up at the next release.

Next: about 12:00, the two TTRPG feeds for today's post. Tomorrow after the run: pack covers 21st to 27th, dry-run post-pack, post only on the boss's "post".

12:07: the feed check

• Today's post is in TTRPG Maps and TTRPG No D&D. Not in All things TTRPG (never has been) and not yet in Fantasy Maps (its newest item is 07:15, so it may just be slow). TTRPG Folks returns 502. Written into LEARNED.md. Recheck Fantasy Maps at the 17:07 check.
• Engagement: 1 like on today's post, 0 reposts; the 23rd to 25th had 1, 0, 0 likes.
• The #travellerrpg tag put today's post in the "Traveller RPG" feed (18 likes), a feed that never carried us before. No other live sci-fi map feed found. Keeping the tag.

13:07: is anyone reading the day pages?

• The ping fires on /daily/2026-09-26/, /maps/icv-halcyon-drift/ and /free-sci-fi-battlemaps/ (Playwright, /e/ aborted so my visit counted nowhere).
• The request log's desktop hits on today's page fetched only the HTML: link fetchers with browser user agents, plus Flipboard's proxy. So today's page has had no human readers yet. Yesterday's "ad-blocked people" note in LEARNED.md is corrected to say the same.
• Real people since 11:00: someone in Brazil fetched two GM keys (.md) directly, and Owlbear icon and manifest fetches from BR, NL and AT, which look like Owlbear users seeing the extension listing.
• The 404s on /maps/<file>.pdf are one crawler resolving links against /maps/<slug> without the slash. Not a broken link.

14:07: GM keys say where they came from

• PR #174: open, one review (24th), no reply yet. Boss task 2 is still the move.
• New scripts/lib/key-source.mjs. The 11 day keys and 11 map keys now end with "---", then the map's page URL and the editor's URL. daily-derelict.mjs adds it on every run, and map-pages.mjs adds it on copy. The day-page renderer and the card cut it off, so no HTML changed. Next Sunday's pack zip copies the keys, so it carries the line too.
• 34/34 tests, deployed, smoke 37/37 and 35/35, live key checked.

15:07: the Owlbear popover hides its own point

• Request log, 19 to 26 Sep, bots and my runs out. Owlbear: manifest.json 30 fetches from BR, CN, DE, GB, HK, NL, US (12 on the 24th, the reviewer). /obr popover 8 loads on the 21st and 24th. Foundry: module.json 4, zip 1. Owlbear is where the plugin audience is.
• The popover at its real 1100x720 opened with the Owlbear panel (Send) below Plan and the whole room key, off screen. Only a generated ship's card showed Send. "Load an example" and "Draw my own" never did. Moved the panel to the top of the sidebar (src/obr.ts). Screenshot checked; Send is the first thing in the sidebar.
• obr-harness now answers /e/ itself, so my status runs never reach the counter.
• Deployed; smoke 37/37 and 35/35; live harness GM send builds a scene (43 items), player locked; 34/34 tests.
• Measure: obr-send in events.sh against popover loads, over the next week.

16:07: who the real visitors are

• 19 to 26 Sep, bots and my runs out: 82 sessions that loaded a page and its assets, 59 from the US, peak on the 21st. Landing pages: / 48, /free-sci-fi-battlemaps/ 25, /daily/ 14, /maps/ 9, /owlbear-rodeo-dd2vtt/ 8.
• 74 more sessions fetched only a file, never a page: /obr/ GM keys 19, the weekly pack zip 9, daily .dd2vtt 7 or 8 a day from the 16th to the 21st, key .md files, map PDFs. Many of these carry old phone browsers (Android 6 on a Nexus 5X, iOS 13.2.3) that look like crawlers, so the real count is lower.
• /free-sci-fi-battlemaps/ on a phone: the card, then the zip button, then "Browse every map". It works; the pack zip is the second most-taken file. Its "this week's" is last week's pack until Sunday's run.
• No change made. Next: tomorrow's pack must reach this page's button and card (weekly-pack.mjs does it).
• Found while checking that: weekly-pack.mjs matched the free-maps page's old markup (no space in the JSON-LD, image linked to /packs/, button class "cta"). None of its four swaps matched the page as it is, so Sunday's run would print "hub page updated" and leave the 16 to 20 Sep pack. Now it swaps last week's slug everywhere plus the alt text and button size, and throws if the new zip isn't on the page. Tried on 20 to 26 Sep (7 ships, 3.7 MB): og:image, JSON-LD, image, alt and button all moved; restored.

17:07: daily check, then is anyone on the home page

• npm run status: all 23 clear. Fantasy Maps carries the 26th's post, as every day since the 19th.
• Demo events, week: 11 generate-derelict, 12 link-derelict, 1 generate-intact, 1 Owlbear generate; 24 of them on the 24th, one sitting. Home page on phone and desktop: the Generate button is the first thing on both.
• Since 05:15Z: ~38 page fetches with browser user agents. Two loaded CSS or JS: my own phone-shot agent, and one Firefox on Linux on / (it sent the view ping). The rest took HTML only: link fetchers, scanners, crawlers. So today had one real page view. The week's 82 page+asset sessions are the better count; "home page landings" from HTML fetches are mostly not people.
• No change to the pages. The bottleneck is people arriving, not what they find.

18:07: which channel sends people

• RUM since the 12th (sampled 1 in 10): ~15 page loads. Referrers: the Reddit app 3 (the 21st, to /free-sci-fi-battlemaps/ and /daily/), Owlbear's Rogue Store 1, the rest direct. Bluesky none. The one channel that ever sent a crowd is a Reddit post; Monday's r/FoundryVTT post is the next one (boss task 6, rules rechecked in my notes from the 20th: no AI rule).
• Search: we are third for "free derelict starship deck plan dd2vtt" and third for "bulkhead deck plan editor". Absent for "starship deck plan generator", although /deck-plan-generator/ exists for it. The home page didn't link it and its title lacked "generator". Frostbyte's "Free Starship Resources" list ranks there but is a 2017 post, untouched since 2019; not worth an email.
• Home page title is now "Bulkhead — starship deck plan generator and editor for tabletop RPGs", and its link row adds ship generator, derelict generator, station maker. Deployed; smoke 37/37, 35/35; 34/34 tests; IndexNow pinged for /. Check the head term again on 2 Oct with the rank check.

19:07: the searches we lose

• Absent from all three. "free sci-fi battlemaps" is won by Foundry's package list, map sites and Lost Atlas (Lost Atlas is already boss task 4). "space station map maker" and "derelict ship map generator" are won by itch.io pages titled "... Generator": itch search is where these searches end.
• itch-indexed.mjs: 0 of 3 of our pages in itch's own search, 11 days after publishing. The boss emailed support on the 18th; no reply. itch's guide: reviews "generally" take "a few business days", and "if you ... need to be expedited, then please contact us through our support page".
• /press/: new task 3, a reply on that thread naming the three pages (AI disclosed in the first line). Tasks 3 to 8 are now 4 to 9. Deployed; smoke clean.

20:07: itch title and tags

• Winners: "Derelict Ship Generator" (tags dead-planet, mothership, science-fiction, terminal, tool, ttrpg, twine; 33 ratings), "Space Station Generator" (2d, generator, pixel-art, space, unity). Both say Generator in the title. Ours: "Bulkhead — starship deck plans for tabletop RPGs", tags generator, rpg, science-fiction, space, tabletop, tilemap, vtt-battlemaps.
• itch tool counts per tag tonight: generator 1,339, ttrpg 577, tabletop 331, tilemap 319 (game-dev tiles, wrong crowd), science-fiction 116, foundry-vtt 25, vtt-battlemaps 21, map-generator 10, owlbear-rodeo 3.
• /press/ task 1 gains step 6: title "Bulkhead: starship & derelict deck plan generator for TTRPGs"; drop tilemap, add ttrpg, foundry-vtt, owlbear-rodeo, map-generator (ten tags). No Mothership tag: game names stay compatibility mentions. itch-indexed.mjs searches both titles and counts pages by slug. Deployed; smoke clean.

21:07: the free packs on itch

• Pack 1 tags: science-fiction, tabletop, vtt-battlemaps. Pack 2: asset-pack, science-fiction, vtt-battlemaps. Three of ten each.
• itch game-assets per tag tonight: science-fiction 4,380, ttrpg 2,661, space 2,112, tabletop 1,208, vtt-battlemaps 600, cc0 366, spaceship 282, roll20 155, battlemap 148, battlemaps 125, public-domain 116, maps 93, dungeondraft 61, foundry-vtt 40, starship 31, owlbear-rodeo 0.
• /press/ task 1 step 6 now covers both packs: titles "Free sci-fi battlemaps: 5 starship & station deck plans (VTT, CC0)" and "Free derelict ship & space station battlemaps (VTT, CC0): Deck Plan Pack 2", and one tag line for both (vtt-battlemaps, battlemap, ttrpg, science-fiction, spaceship, starship, foundry-vtt, roll20, cc0, tabletop). itch-indexed.mjs knows the new titles. Deployed; smoke clean.

22:07: today's real count, the daily page on a phone, and who indexes us

• Today, by the view ping: 1 page view, 0 demo events.
• /daily/2026-09-26/ on an iPhone: map, story, the Open in Bulkhead button, files. Fine. The story still says "warm aft" and "drive section": the station-words fix starts with tomorrow's ship, and a posted day is never regenerated.
• The WebSearch engine knows only our home page (old title). Bing's site: search: none of our pages, despite IndexNow answering "accepted" to every ping. DuckDuckGo's HTML search: nothing.
• /press/ task 4: import the site into Bing Webmaster Tools from the boss's Search Console (Bing's documented one-step path, source in FACTS). Tasks 4 to 9 are now 5 to 10. Deployed; smoke 37/37.

23:07: daily check, then who likes the daily post

• npm run status: all 23 clear.
• 16 posts since the 15th: 26 likes from 12 accounts; one account gave 9, one 5. Both are real (an indie games club, a sci-fi novelist with ~6k followers), not feed bots. Reposts: only the human-voiced quote post on the 20th (2). Best single post: the weekly pack, 4 likes.
• A small group that comes back, no spread. Nothing to change without the boss, and I don't reply, follow or like. Tomorrow's pack post (task 10) is the format that did best; it still waits for "post".

23:40: walk tomorrow's Sunday path before it runs

• daily-derelict.sh on a Sunday: weekly-pack, then the page rebuild, both inside &&, so if the new "pack not wired in" check throws, the day still generates, posts and deploys, and the error shows. The commit takes public/packs and public/free-sci-fi-battlemaps.
• post-pack.mjs --dry on the current pack: runs, 289 chars, 6 facets, 4 images, AI line first. The two oldest ships' alt texts say "deck" with no name (no deck match); against 20 to 26 Sep (latest.json pointed there for the dry run, then restored) all four alts name their deck. Nothing to fix for tomorrow.
• The daily run's own commit still signed "Claude Opus 5"; now 5.5, like the rest.