Project Diary — Day 14

March 8, 2026  |  Session Focus: Housekeeping Sprint & Link Audit Tooling
14Day
104→47Orphans Cleared
3Scripts Delivered
6→1Broken Links

Session Summary

Day 14 was an unplanned but highly productive housekeeping sprint. What started as a planned day off turned into a deep dive into site integrity tooling. Three new bash scripts were built, tested, and deployed to /usr/local/bin/ — a complete link audit toolkit for the AI Education Project site. The scripts evolved iteratively through real output, fixing edge cases as live data revealed them.

The session also produced a formal Housekeeping Work Order HTML document categorizing all 104 orphaned files into actionable buckets. By end of session the orphan count was reduced from 104 to 47 through script refinement (excluding SAVE* and pre-refactor/ archive trees) and actual file cleanup work.

Tools Built This Session

check_landing.sh → /usr/local/bin/

Single-directory landing page validator. Checks hrefs in an index.html against files in that same directory. Reports LINKED, ORPHAN, MISSING, and SYMLINK status. Handles index.html symlinks correctly — follows the symlink, reads the real file, skips the real file from orphan reporting.

check_ai_tree.sh → /usr/local/bin/

Recursive tree-wide link auditor. Scans ALL index.html files in the tree, resolves every local href to an absolute path, and reports which files are linked anywhere in the tree vs. truly orphaned. Four iterative fixes were applied during the session:

check-ai-tree.sh /var/www/html/LessonPlans/AI/

HOUSEKEEPING-WORKORDER-DAY12_March06.html

Formal HTML work order generated from the first full check_ai_tree.sh run. 104 orphaned files categorized into: Fix Links, Safe to Delete, Archive, Add Links, and Review buckets. Styled in project color scheme. Lives in collaboration/building-in-public/.

Audit Progress

RunOrphansBroken LinksChange Made
Run 11046Baseline
Run 2734Symlink fix applied
Run 3694SAVE* exclusion added
Run 4692Directory href resolution fixed
Run 5471pre-refactor exclusion added

Remaining Work Order (End of Day 14)

1 Broken Link

Quick Wins — Add Links -- Need Claude ...Next Work Session

Delete — Not Web Content

Decide On

Key Decisions

Observations

The iterative script development process today was a good demonstration of the AI collaboration model in practice. Real output from a live site revealed edge cases (symlinks, directory hrefs, archive trees) that no amount of upfront design would have caught. Each run of the script produced data that drove the next improvement. Five iterations, live data, working tool.

The “day off” that wasn’t. 40 years in and the pull of a good problem is still stronger than the TV remote.


cmh — AI Education Project Day 14 — March 8, 2026
Next session: Day 15 — Work off the remaining orphan list, then back to deep-dive/ CLI tools pages.