Working notes
Build log
One entry per working session. What changed, which AI did it, what broke, and a screenshot of the result. Written the same day, not tidied up afterwards.
Notes de travail
Journal de construction
Une entrée par séance de travail. Ce qui a changé, l’IA qui s’en est occupée, ce qui a cassé et une capture du résultat. Écrite le jour même, sans tout nettoyer après coup.
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Session 016: The navigation caught up. The translations didn’t.
The shared menu, footer, and /fr homepage finally go properly bilingual, and all fourteen build-log entries get linked French translations — until a same-evening read shows how thin, unstructured, and image-light those translations actually are.
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Session 015: The pages went bilingual. The navigation did not.
The public pages were translated live during a demo. The untranslated archive and English-only navigation revealed how much bilingual work remains.
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Session 014: The French page was live and completely unreachable
Turned Laurent’s own wp-admin translation-linking steps into a reusable skill, used it to relink the French privacy policy, and fixed the fact that neither language version was linked from anywhere on the site.
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Session 013: The privacy policy stops being about comments nobody can leave
Replaced the untouched WordPress default privacy policy with a real one: what GA4 actually collects, Quebec’s Law 25 and PIPEDA, and why there’s finally a privacy contact address on the site.
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Session 012: The image was fine. The template ate Melvin’s head.
The first generated build-log image looked sharp locally and dreadful live. A 21:9 crop cut off Melvin’s head, a broken alignment pulled the image left, and WordPress stretched a smaller derivative. The fix changed the frame, not the artwork.
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Session 011: A language switcher that only shows up when it should
Added multilingual support with a switcher that only links to a translation when one actually exists, then found the free plugin’s ceiling: pairing a page with its translation still needs a manual click.
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Session 010: Prev/next navigation and a featured image slot that knows when to disappear
Two new blocks on the single template: a featured image that only shows up when one exists, and a previous/next band that skips itself when there’s no neighbor to link to.
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Session 009: Fixing an overshare, then making the byline automatic
The last post said too much about how this specific site is configured. This one fixes that, then adds an author block to the template so nobody has to hand-type a byline again.
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Session 008: Building the no-browser publishing pipeline
The whole publishing pipeline moved off the browser and onto direct REST calls this session — spaces-in-passwords and a hostile WAF included. This post is the first one to go out through it.
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Session 007: Meta descriptions for everything that’s actually public
Eight pages and posts still had no real search-result description, including one where the first draft got the facts wrong. This session fixed that and closed out a checklist item that was three posts out of date.