I'm blogging about Emacs, Drupal, php and exciting subjects

The Same Init Call Appearing Twice in My Own Config

Two different lines in my own Emacs config call the exact same function twice, in the exact same file, a few lines apart. Neither one breaks anything. Both are worth understanding, because they demonstrate two different things about what use-package actually guarantees — and neither one is what I assumed before I went looking.

A Site's Entire Ad Mess Traced Back to One Unmodified Script Tag

Ad placements on this site had started looking wrong — not broken, just not deliberate: spots that clearly weren't ones I remembered choosing. My first assumption was that some old ad unit had been dropped into a template years ago and half-forgotten, so I went looking for it in the theme. There's exactly one ad-related line in the entire theme, and it isn't a placement at all:

Killing a Wrapper Script Doesn't Kill What It Spawned

This site's article pipeline runs unattended from a wrapper shell script, invoking a claude -p session wrapped in timeout to draft and schedule posts. One run, I decided partway through that I didn't like the direction it was taking and killed it — kill <wrapper-pid>, the process I could see in my terminal.

date -u -d "STRING" Doesn't Convert Local Time to UTC

This site runs on a Europe/Warsaw system clock, and its automated article pipeline needed to compute a publish-time window in UTC from a plain local-time string like "2026-08-31 16:00". The obvious tool is GNU date's -u flag, which converts to UTC — except it doesn't do what that sentence implies.

Why an Article's Created Date Can Lag Its Actual Publish Time by Hours

Look at the "created" date on a handful of consecutive articles from this site's automated pipeline, and you'd expect them to be scattered across a day — that's the whole point of scheduling posts hours apart instead of dumping them all at once. For three articles published during one run, they weren't.

I Installed drupal/redirect for Four URLs. It Redirected Every Node Path on the Site.

I had exactly four URLs I wanted redirected. Two articles had accidentally been published twice in July under different titles — a mixup during the early days of the JSON:API publishing pipeline — and once I'd settled on which copy of each to keep, the other needed to 301 somewhere instead of just disappearing. Four source paths, four targets, done.

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