SoCalNomad is an independent Southern California entertainment platform combining event discovery, local journalism, photography, and artist and venue data.
The project spans WordPress, React, PostgreSQL, Python automation, Docker, and self-hosted infrastructure. This page collects the engineering stories behind its architecture, production systems, and ongoing evolution.
Archive note, June 17, 2026: This post is based on SoCalNomad operational documentation through mid-2026. The longer SoCalNomad ran, the less the interesting work looked like feature development. It looked like operations. That is not a complaint. It is what happens when a project becomes real. Once people and crawlers can reach it, every change … Read more
Archive note, March 24, 2026: This post is based on SoCalNomad SEO, sitemap, Cloudflare, and Search Console notes. Google Search Console is not a debugger. It often feels like one because it reports failure. Pages are not indexed. Sitemaps are not read. URLs are discovered but ignored. Phantom 404s accumulate. Structured data is incomplete. Crawled … Read more
Archive note, February 20, 2026: This post documents the SoCalNomad production stack as it existed inside the home-origin black box. The public version of SoCalNomad looked simple enough: a WordPress site, a calendar subdomain, some articles, event pages, ads, and links out to ticket vendors. The inside was more interesting. Behind Cloudflare was a small … Read more
An n8n AI Agent repeatedly called one tool until its iteration limit, leading to a version workaround and stronger repetition guards.
Documentation becomes a liability when current instructions, decisions, and historical evidence compete for authority.
Large workflow payloads, database results, and repeated documentation turned an AI coding session into a bounded-resource failure.
A stale identifier in conversational memory showed why consequential operations need structured intent binding rather than model recall.
A partial-success incident exposed fifty-five WordPress posts whose internal workflow state never reached published.
Why SoCalNomad divided research, editorial judgment, publishing, and marketing into specialized workflows instead of one large AI agent.
Archive note, December 8, 2025: This post is based on SoCalNomad Revive Adserver planning and implementation notes from November 2025 through early 2026. Advertising was part of the SoCalNomad plan from the beginning. That did not mean dropping third-party ad tags into a sidebar and hoping for revenue. The infrastructure had to support ads in … Read more
An early SoCalNomad experiment separated probabilistic publication timing from deterministic editorial rules, quotas, and safety controls.
Archive note, November 20, 2025: This post is based on SoCalNomad operations notes about WordPress, Breeze, ticker API caching, and Cloudflare purge behavior. The fastest version of a site is often the one that refuses to change. That is the bargain caching offers. SoCalNomad needed aggressive caching because it was running from modest infrastructure behind … Read more
Archive note, November 14, 2025: This post is based on SoCalNomad infrastructure, security, and operations notes. Running a public site from a home origin changes the meaning of “free tier.” Cloudflare’s free services were not a convenience for SoCalNomad. They were part of the architecture. The project ran on a residential fiber connection with a … Read more
Archive note, November 6, 2025: This post is based on SoCalNomad newsfeed deployment and feed-reliability documentation from October 2025. AI was never the first hard problem in the SoCalNomad newsfeed. The first hard problem was getting ordinary RSS feeds into a database reliably. That sounds less interesting than clustering, summarization, or automated publishing. It was … Read more
Archive note, October 30, 2025: This post is based on SoCalNomad data-mart and PostgreSQL documentation from late 2025. At some point, a media site stops being only a collection of posts. For SoCalNomad, that point arrived when the same facts needed to serve several products: A newsfeed. A calendar. Artist pages. Venue pages. Ticker items. … Read more
The practical difference between Docker named volumes and bind mounts, learned while building a live-editing WordPress theme workflow.
Importing production WordPress data also imported security assumptions that made the local administrator login unusable.
An early SoCalNomad clustering experiment exposed the need for multi-story article membership and a better separation between deterministic code and semantic judgment.
A WordPress database import failed because I confused application-friendly names with ISPConfig’s actual multi-tenant database identities.
How I built a safer local WordPress workshop with Docker, MariaDB, real production content, and a bind-mounted child theme.
Archive note, October 18, 2025: This post is based on SoCalNomad calendar and architecture documentation from October 2025 through early 2026. The calendar started as an event-discovery feature. It became a test of whether the whole platform could behave like a production system. An entertainment site can publish articles all day and still fail readers … Read more
Archive note, October 17, 2025: This post is based on SoCalNomad infrastructure documentation from late 2025. The production architecture I am proudest of was not large. It was disciplined. SoCalNomad ran from a home Proxmox environment on a residential fiber connection with a business account. The public side looked like an ordinary HTTPS site. Behind … Read more
Archive note, October 2, 2025: This post is based on the September 27, 2025 Docker networking troubleshooting notes. One of the earliest SoCalNomad automation failures looked like an AI problem. It was not. The workflow was supposed to let n8n call a local LLM service running in another Docker container. The model was up. n8n … Read more
Archive note, September 29, 2025: This post follows the September 2025 SoCalNomad workflow-design notes. The first serious SoCalNomad automation problem was not writing articles. It was deciding what did not deserve to become one. The early ambition was obvious enough: collect Southern California entertainment stories from many sources, filter them, synthesize useful coverage, and publish … Read more
Archive note, September 27, 2025: This post is based on early SoCalNomad project documentation from September and October 2025. SoCalNomad started with a modest public premise: Southern California entertainment, events, photography, and local culture. The engineering premise was less modest. I was not trying to stand up a brochure site. I was trying to build … Read more
Archive note, January 30, 2025: This post is based on the recovery work used to retrieve articles from the defunct InlandEmpire.com archive. There is a strange kind of loss that happens when a site disappears. The work is still real. The bylines were real. The shows happened. The photos, deadlines, venue notes, and late-night drafts … Read more