Grouping Listings Did Not Give Search Engines One Event
Existing event groups now determine canonical URLs and sitemap eligibility, with a fallback when the primary listing becomes inactive.
srand.info is my personal knowledge base: a collection of projects, technical notes, lessons learned, experiments, and occasional detours. My career and interests have crossed software, infrastructure, photography, automotive work, and independent media.
The categories will evolve, but the purpose is simple: document what I build, preserve what I learn, and share anything that might be useful or interesting to someone else.
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The Source Field Could Not Tell Me Who Wrote the Page
SoCalNomad added authorship flags and text revision dates to distinguish Scott’s original calendar writing from AI-assisted drafts.
The Parking Directory Was Mostly Placeholders
A parking-directory audit cut 12,765 sitemap URLs to 169 by requiring linked lot data and removing unsupported summaries and ratings.
The Sharpest Frame Isn’t Always the Keeper
Why timing, expression, light, motion, and usable focus can matter more than lab-perfect sharpness when choosing a photograph.
What I’m Willing to Give Away
A personal line for donating selected unpublished archive photographs to the public commons while keeping finished site work at home.
A Sync Could Not Preserve What The Portal Forgot
The business problem looked like a CRM integration. Bookings lived in a third-party portal. A self-hosted CRM could provide a better working view, so the obvious architecture was to copy the current records across on a schedule. That design failed the moment I asked what should happen when a booking changed silently or disappeared from … Read more
The Archive Nobody Else Could Build
I did not set out to make a documentary archive of festival work. I was working. Sometimes I had a camera with me. Over the years, the photographs accumulated: a crew getting ready before the gates opened, a quiet stretch of grounds that would soon be crowded, glitter going on, an armload of leis moving … Read more
Four Food Photos Defined The AI Contract
I could have started Seasoned Pan’s meal estimator by connecting a camera to a vision model and asking for calories. That would have produced an impressive demo and a dishonest product. Instead, I put four awkward, ordinary food photographs in front of the proposed response format before building the feature: a homemade taco, a frosted … Read more
Event Deduplication Is Editorial Judgment
Two event records share a venue and start time. Are they duplicates? At a single-stage club, probably. At a casino with several rooms or a festival with several stages, perhaps not. If one provider lists the headliner and another lists the full co-bill, title equality may be less useful than artist relationships. I stopped thinking … Read more
AI Atmosphere Images That Do Not Compete With My Photography
An automated event card needs a background. The calendar does not have original photography for every venue, and repeatedly generating fake concert photographs would blur an important line in the project. SoCalNomad is partly a photography platform. Synthetic imagery should fill a production gap without pretending to document a place I have not photographed. I … Read more