Make every tenth published post a guest post, chosen without a human - #208
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Guest posting was a manual loop: open the project, read the ranked
opportunities, pick a partner, pick one of the crossed topics, click. Every
piece of judgement in that loop was already computed — findGuestPostOpportunities
ranks the partners and crosses the seed keywords — so what the click actually
contributed was a decision to proceed and a choice of the top item. Both are now
automatic and both run on the publishing schedule.
The cadence is counted from articles already on file rather than from a counter
column, so it is self-correcting: a failed generation, a manual post or a
restored backup all move the count and the rhythm follows reality instead of a
number somebody has to remember to increment. Guest posts count toward the ten
themselves — "every 10th post" means every 10th post, not every 10th own-blog
post plus extras.
Three decisions worth arguing with, all tested:
* **A slot is never spent on a guest post that cannot be placed.** No partner,
no unused topic, or everyone written for recently, and the site publishes to
its own blog as it always did. The schedule is what a customer is paying
for; silence would be the worse failure, so this falls through rather than
skipping.
* **Nothing is published outside the network.** A target must be
backlinks_enabled, active and not flagged for inappropriate content — the
same filter the manual matcher applies. Partners opted into receiving guest
posts; strangers did not, and an automated loop must not be the thing that
forgets the difference.
* **A partner is not written for twice inside thirty days.** Ranking is stable
and the matcher is stateless by design, so without a cooldown the
top-ranked partner would receive a post every ten slots for ever. That is
the shape that gets a link network discounted, and it is exactly the failure
mode automation introduces — a human clicking would have noticed.
The manual path's ledger (lx_guest_post_request) is reused rather than
duplicated, so a human and the cron cannot independently commission the same
article.
A cadence count that errors resolves to "not a guest post". That direction is
deliberate: failing closed keeps the customer's own blog publishing, where
failing open would redirect every post on the schedule to somebody else's
domain.
`guest_posts_unavailable` is reported by the cron rather than swallowed. A
number that climbs every day means the partner network has stopped producing
matches, and that is invisible from the article count alone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Guest posting was a manual loop: open the project, read the ranked opportunities, pick a partner, pick a crossed topic, click. Every piece of judgement in that loop was already computed —
findGuestPostOpportunitiesranks partners and crosses seed keywords. What the click contributed was a decision to proceed and a choice of the top item. Both are now automatic, on the publishing schedule.Cadence
Counted from articles already on file, not a counter column — so it self-corrects. A failed generation, a manual post, a restored backup all move the count, and the rhythm follows reality rather than a number someone must remember to increment. Guest posts count toward the ten themselves: every 10th post means every 10th post, not every 10th own-blog post plus extras.
Three decisions worth arguing with (all tested)
backlinks_enabled,active, and not flagged for inappropriate content — the same filter the manual matcher applies. Partners opted in; strangers didn't, and an automated loop mustn't be the thing that forgets the difference.Smaller things
lx_guest_post_request) is reused, not duplicated, so a human and the cron can't independently commission the same article.guest_posts_unavailableis reported by the cron rather than swallowed. A number climbing daily means the partner network has stopped producing matches, which is invisible from the article count alone.1,675 tests pass (8 new);
tsc --noEmitclean.🤖 Generated with Claude Code