EI-4.1 — Current Content Audit

Status: COMPLETE
Date: 2026-08-08
Baseline: 8da943d7cbc0338550680ef5ee7be6ae60fe51b5

Objective

Audit production content outside the completed EI-1 historical implementation set and identify normalization work required by the EI-3 content model. This sprint records decisions; it does not broadly rewrite articles.

Scope

The current-content production corpus consists of:

• three authored 2026 Writing posts;
• the current PTIR run beginning July 28, 2026;
• current/static site pages and compatibility routes;
• recent pre-2026 posts that remain in production but still use legacy metadata.

The EI-3 historical collection, rewritten historical flagships, and archive policy are not reclassified here.

Findings

A. Current authored Writing — NORMALIZE

These posts do not require broad editorial rewrites in EI-4. Their principal defect is metadata drift.

B. PTIR editions — NORMALIZE AS A BATCH

The production tree contains the PTIR run from July 28 through August 8, 2026, with morning/evening editions where published. Current files use categories: PTIR and topical tags; editions already carry useful edition and permalink metadata.

Action: NORMALIZE in EI-4.3.

Canonical PTIR metadata:

content_type: briefing
series: PTIR
edition: Morning | Evening

PTIR is a publication/series, not a subject. Existing topical tags may be reviewed for removal or retained only as non-authoritative descriptive metadata. Discovery must stop depending on categories: PTIR after normalization.

C. Recent/pre-current Writing still using legacy taxonomy — REVIEW/NORMALIZE

The production tree also contains several non-Loudmouth posts from 2022–2024 and older archive-retained posts. Two examples demonstrate unresolved metadata debt:

• 2022-09-04-everything-we-got-wrong.md uses categories: History, although the canonical subject is Computing History.
• 2022-12-07-origins-of-paco.md uses the deliberately retired Personal category and still carries rewrite_candidate: true.
• 2024-04-16-what-will-the-next-post-bring.md uses categories: Security; its filename no longer matches its published title, but the filename itself is not a public URL contract.

Action: REVIEW in EI-4.2 against the EI-3 historical disposition before changing content. Normalize metadata where the item remains intentionally published; do not use EI-4 as a back door to overturn EI-1 decisions.

D. Pages and compatibility routes

E. Discovery logic debt

The principal known compatibility debt is PTIR discovery logic. _pages/ptir.md and Writing exclusions still tolerate categories: PTIR because the PTIR corpus has not yet been normalized. EI-4.3 should remove that fallback after every PTIR post carries series: PTIR and content_type: briefing.

F. Metadata vocabulary

EI-3.2 remains authoritative:

Subjects

• Technology
• Teaching
• Computing History
• Journalism & Media

Content types

• writing
• briefing
• collection
• portfolio

Personal, Web, AI, Security, History, Blog, PTIR, and The Loudmouth are not canonical subjects. Some may remain temporarily as compatibility metadata, but new discovery logic must not depend on them.

G. URL observations

• Explicit permalinks are public contracts and should be preserved unless EI-4.4 intentionally maps a redirect.
• Filename/title mismatches are maintenance issues, not automatically URL defects when an explicit permalink exists.
• /blog/ and /categories/ are compatibility URLs with intentional modern meanings and should not be removed merely because their old semantics are retired.

H. Privacy/media governance

No EI-4 normalization action authorizes recovery of DELETE/private material or production media. The EI-1 Ben/Sophie exclusion and EI-2 Google Drive/GitHub media boundary remain hard constraints.

Normalization manifest

Decisions for subsequent sprints

1. EI-4.2 should normalize authored Writing metadata without rewriting bodies unless a concrete defect requires it.
2. EI-4.3 should normalize the PTIR corpus as one controlled batch and then remove category-based discovery fallbacks.
3. EI-4.4 should treat explicit permalinks and known compatibility URLs as contracts to audit rather than casually rename.
4. EI-4.5 should automate validation of canonical subjects/content types and the established privacy/media rules.

Closeout

EI-4.1 is an audit-only sprint. No current article body, permalink, or publication decision was changed. The audit converts observed metadata drift into an explicit normalization queue for EI-4.2 through EI-4.5.

Next sprint: EI-4.2 — Metadata Normalization.