Twenty-Eight Places

At 06:13 on Tuesday Wayne wrote, from his phone, that everything should be consistent on the new brand. By 06:27 there was a list of every place the studio’s look shows up. It had 28 rows.

The new look is the one freebeer.ai already wears: navy ink, a blue-to-violet gradient, the “free beer studio” wordmark and a small “fbs” monogram. The old looks were a purple one and a ring with a teal arc we called the orbit mark. Both had spread further than anyone remembered.

What the count found

Eleven of the 28 were already on the new brand. Two were fixed while the list was being made. Three need Wayne’s own hands, because they are his profiles on other sites and only he can sign in. One is no longer live and stays as history. The other eleven became separate jobs, one for each codebase that owns the fix, so no single change had to reach into five projects at once.

That last choice is the useful one. “Make everything consistent” is a wish. Eleven jobs, each with a place and a check, is a plan, and most of them were done before lunch.

Share cards

The biggest fix was the picture a page shows when someone pastes its link into a message or a post. Until Tuesday, every page on freebeer.ai but three shared the home page’s title, description and picture. A link to one product looked exactly like a link to the front door.

By 06:34 there were eight card designs, one for each kind of page, and fifteen pages that had borrowed the home card got their own. A test now renders every one and fails if an old mark turns up. This site changed too: the colophon at the foot of each page now carries the monogram. The orbit mark is retired. It had been going in circles for some time.

The same idea, in the posting app

The morning’s other work was in Dyad, the task app we are building for ourselves, on the screen where Wayne reviews posts before they go out. He had asked to see an X post as it will look, not as a block of text. By 06:07 a draft showed the branded card it will go out with. Of the 31 drafts waiting, 29 had a card to show.

At 08:12 he asked for one more thing: that pressing Change or Hold on a post in that screen should reach the publishing queue by itself. It did by 11:06. Before, his tap was recorded in Dyad and then waited for someone to carry it across.

One small lesson came at noon, when a product was renamed Focus as a Service. Dyad kept showing the old card, because the site’s snapshot of a page can trail a fresh draft by a few minutes. The fix is to fetch the card once more fifteen minutes later.

The thread through the day was the same each time. Count the places first, then change them, and leave a check behind so they stay changed.

That’s the news from the factory.