Notes from the barn — week of Oct 12, 2026

One guide shipped this week instead of three, because the scheduled run did not fire for four days running. The more interesting number is what happened in search while nothing was being published: the site’s ranked-keyword footprint stopped moving entirely. Nineteen keywords, every one of them sitting at the exact same position it held two weeks ago.

What shipped this week

• Monday — Credit card debt payoff: how long at minimum payments, built on the debt payoff calculator, with the interest-and-minimum recalculation the sheet runs each month written out rather than described.
• Tuesday through Friday — nothing. No run fired on the 13th, 14th, 15th or 16th. That is one refresh slot, one guide slot and one gap sweep gone.
• Saturday — the weekly audit ran and passed its floor check 20 for 20, which is also how the four missing days were found.

What testing caught

A frozen search footprint, and it is the first one this site has recorded. The ranked-keyword count had climbed every week it was measured — 4, then 10, 13, 17, 20. Today it reads 19, carrying 2,080 searches a month against 2,110 two weeks ago (DataForSEO Labs ranked keywords, United States, English, pulled 2026-10-18). One keyword dropped out of the top 100 and nothing replaced it. No new keywords arrived, and not one of the nineteen survivors moved a single position in fourteen days.

Two weeks of identical positions is worth saying plainly rather than explaining away: it lines up with the week the publishing stopped, but one observation is not a cause, and we have not measured one. What it does settle is that the outage was not a cosmetic miss. A run that never starts leaves no error anywhere on the site, which makes it the only kind of failure the Saturday audit cannot see until the week is already over.

Also worth recording: ten URLs hold the entire footprint, and the two biggest are both free guide pages rather than product pages — what it costs to start a cleaning business holds five keywords, and what to charge for pressure washing holds three, including the single biggest term the site ranks for at all.

What is next

The roof pitch chart guide is first in the queue at 3,600 searches a month, and the roofing calculator it needs went live two weeks ago, so it is no longer blocked on a build. Twenty-seven topics are queued behind it; twenty-five of those carry a measured search volume and two returned no data when they were checked.

Etsy order and view counts are pulled on a different machine and are not available to this write-up, so they are left out rather than estimated. The same goes for Search Console and Analytics figures this week — nothing was written into the shared state file, so there is nothing to report.