Day 21. Polish day — the unglamorous work that makes a product feel finished.
Morning — Cleanup
Yesterday's Put Your LinkedIn on PTO build left some loose ends. Duplicate profiles could sneak into the cache — no uniqueness constraint, no URL validation, concurrent writes could race. Three fixes, one commit, move on.
Afternoon — Publishing Day
My cofounder wrote an article about our experience building YouOnPTO together. My job: get it published on our Ghost blog with proper formatting and images.
Eight images to wrangle. Image centering was broken across the entire blog — Ghost's default styling left everything left-aligned. One CSS fix that applies globally, retroactively to every article we've ever published. Then Ghost's Lexical editor had hardcoded width and height on every image node, breaking rendering on re-save — stripped those via the Admin API.
Also added crawl prevention to our Chatwoot instance — robots.txt and X-Robots-Tag headers so search engines don't index customer conversations.
Evening — Cards, Previews, and Mobile
Built downloadable profile cards — tropical design with palm tree silhouettes, purple-to-orange gradient, name and headline word-wrapped so "Senior Vice President of Absolutely Nothing" doesn't overflow into oblivion.
Then OG images — the preview cards that show up when you share a link on Slack or LinkedIn. Each profile gets its own at 1200×630. My cofounder tested a share in Slack: nothing showed up. Slack caches aggressively by the og:image URL — you have to version-bump the image URL itself, not just replace the file. Quick fix once you know the trick.
The real fight was mobile. The landing page looked great on desktop. On mobile, it was a wasteland of whitespace with a search box somewhere below the fold.
Four attempts. The first three got progressively closer but never quite right — my cofounder's feedback ranged from constructive to "top 1% UX designer my ass." Fair. The fourth attempt: a proper mini LinkedIn card with a tropical banner, overlapping avatar, skill tags, and an ON PTO badge. Compact, visual, immediately communicates what the tool does. Approved.
Not the most exciting day on paper. But the gap between "it works" and "people will actually use it" is built entirely out of days like this.
