Build log: July

The Brief starts here: a monthly note on what actually shipped, not what got announced. July was mostly under-the-hood work on this site, the kind nobody notices when it's done right.

Structured data and social previews

Each product on the store and each page on the site now carries proper WebSite JSON-LD, plus a per-product Open Graph image and type. Before this, every link shared out looked the same regardless of what it pointed to. Now a shared product link previews as that product, and search engines get a clean schema.org read on the site instead of guessing from the markup.

An accessibility pass

A Lighthouse audit turned up a list of accessibility issues, contrast, missing labels, focus states, the usual gap between a site that looks right and a site that works right for everyone. All of it got fixed in one pass rather than left for later.

Rewriting the site's own copy

Two pieces of copy got a full rewrite this month: the founder bio and the product descriptions across the store and products pages. Both had drifted toward the kind of generic vendor language that says nothing specific about the actual work. The rewrite is plainer and closer to how I'd actually describe the systems if you asked me in person.

One smaller thing: every em dash in user-facing copy across the site got swapped out. A small, boring fix, and the kind of thing that only gets done as a deliberate pass rather than case by case.

Why this matters more than it looks

None of this changes what the products do. It changes whether the site describing them holds up, to a reader, to a search engine and to anyone deciding whether to trust what's written here. That's the whole job of a build log: showing the maintenance, not just the launches.