Thursday, June 11, 2026

Twelve days of "no traffic" was one wrong line of code.

A debugging day. Real field testing surfaced a few sharp edges on the gasket app, and the public site turned out to have been silently recording nothing for nearly two weeks because of a tiny analytics bug.

Shipped

• Field-test fixes — inspection photos that failed after a while (an expiring login token), a list that wouldn't scroll, and a 100-plus item picker swapped for a simple search of what's actually in stock
• The analytics blackout — chicagogasketservice.com had logged zero visits since the tracking went live; the cause was one malformed line that made every event get ignored. Fixed and confirmed live traffic flowing again
• Analytics pipeline auth — moved the daily data pull onto a non-expiring credential so it stops breaking on its own
• Chains — added create/edit/delete for restaurant and store chains in the admin
• Market direction — wrote up the fuel and convenience-store segment as a target for the gasket business, with the relevant regional chains named

Notes

The analytics bug is the one I'll remember. Everything looked installed and correct — the tracking script loaded, the dashboard was wired up — but a single wrong way of handing data over meant the analytics quietly threw all of it away. "It's loading" is not "it's working." The only proof is seeing a real event land.