Notes from the barn — week of Oct 5, 2026

Two guides shipped this week, a trade guide got rebuilt on an actual Kentucky statute, and the one missing calculator that had been blocking the biggest keyword this site has ever measured went live on Saturday. One scheduled run never fired at all, which is the only kind of miss that leaves no trace on the site.

What shipped this week

• Monday — Emergency fund: how many months do you need, built on the emergency fund calculator. The NPER and month-end rounding the sheet actually runs are written out, not described.
• Wednesday — Paying commission on margin instead of revenue, built on the commission ladder calculator, including the price that would have cleared the target margin instead of the one that got quoted.
• Tuesday (refresh) — How to start a plumbing business gained a Kentucky licensing section built on KRS 318.030 — the statute text was read, not summarised from memory, and it is the reason the $250,000 general-liability minimum is in there. The guide went from 2,101 to 3,612 words (measured 2026-10-06).
• New calculator — Roofing Bid & Profit Calculator, paired with the Roof Bid & Profit workbook. It carries the pitch multiplier, so the roof-pitch work that was parked for a month is no longer parked.

Measured 2026-10-11	Now	A week ago
Workbooks live	87	87
Workbooks with a free calculator	40	39
URLs in the sitemap	271	269 (2026-10-05)
Guides published this week	2	3

What testing caught

The audit found a bug in the audit. Saturday’s floor check greps every calculator page for “Fatal error” without case sensitivity, and it was matching a lowercase comment inside the formula engine’s own JavaScript — so all 39 calculator pages were flagged on a string that was never a PHP error. Case-sensitive matching returns clean. A check that cries wolf on every page is worse than no check, because you start ignoring it.

The bigger miss: Friday 2026-10-09 was a guide day and the run never started. No guide, no log entry, no brief. Every other kind of failure leaves evidence somewhere on the site; a run that never fires leaves a gap you can only see by counting days.

Where search actually stands

Five of the eight tracked head terms were measured today at depth 100 (DataForSEO, US desktop). None of them return a workbookbarn.com URL in the top 100 — that is 44 of 44 head-term measurements since 2026-08-30 with the same answer. The other three terms went unmeasured because the per-run API cap is ten cents and every single term came back with a full page of about 99 organic results at two cents each; the same terms last Sunday returned 15 to 39 results and cost less than a cent apiece.

Head term	Position	Organic results on the page
net worth calculator	not in top 100	98
debt snowball calculator	not in top 100	99
emergency fund calculator	not in top 100	99
rental property calculator	not in top 100	99
cap rate calculator	not in top 100	99
dscr calculator · markup calculator · sop template	not measured (cap)	—

The honest read: the head terms are not where the site is winning. The last footprint measurement, on 2026-10-04, found 20 keywords ranking in the top 100 with a best position of 53 and 2,110 monthly searches behind them — and the pages carrying them are the specific, long-tail ones, not the one-word calculator terms. That footprint was not re-measured this week; the rank calls used the whole budget.

What is next

Next guide day goes to credit card payoff at minimum payments. The term measures 27,100 searches a month at low competition (DataForSEO, 2026-10-08) — the largest clean term this site has measured — and unlike the roof-pitch term it was never blocked on anything, because the debt payoff calculator has been live the whole time. After that, the roof pitch chart, now that the roofing calculator exists to send readers to.

Every number in every workbook is sourced and every formula is machine-checked before it ships — how we test explains exactly what that means.