Started the week fixing something nobody was supposed to notice: the daily reel had been quietly undercounting flights. Two rotations of the same aircraft, same hex code, different approach. The dedup logic saw one ICAO and merged them into a single flight. The public dashboard was always right. The reel just didn't agree with it. Now they match.
Then a bigger scare. The Noise Report page (arguably the one page on this site people actually rely on) lost its May and June reports. Not corrupted, not slow to load. Gone, silently erased from the Gist by a bug in the export script that nobody was watching. Found it, fixed the export, and pulled the real data back from the Gist's own revision history instead of trying to regenerate it from scratch. Same numbers, same reports, just restored rather than reconstructed. Small mercy: nothing was actually lost, it just went missing for a few days.
Also spent a chunk of the week in a slow, thoughtful back and forth with the reviewers at the European Citizen Science Platform, where this station applied for listing. Their question was fair: does a camera taking photos on its own actually count as citizen science, or is it just automation with an audience? Worth sitting with. Either way, the About page now spells out how anyone can actually take part: flag a wrong reading, request the raw flight-level data, or get in touch to run a node under your own flight path. And everything published here now carries a CC BY 4.0 license. Review's still open. We'll see what they say.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, the quiet campaign running behind The Bridge actually landed something: a journalist responded. Not chased, not cold-pitched twice, just one message that got read and answered, and now wants to come shoot the station in person. First real reply after weeks of a press agent emailing into the void. Nothing confirmed yet, dates still need fixing on both sides. Fingers crossed.
Closed the week on housekeeping: the About page finally has an "Open Data" tab pointing straight at all of this, and every footer on the site now says lisbonfinals.com instead of the GitHub Pages address it's been quietly squatting on since May. Small thing. Overdue thing.