The Build Log — Richard Shea https://richshea.com/buildlog Building in public: real milestones, real numbers, and what broke along the way — across PainBeacon, BestRaces, Rich Shea Butter, and richshea.com. en-us https://richshea.com/images/share-buildlog.png The Build Log — Richard Shea https://richshea.com/buildlog BestRaces: the race map, the crawl budget, and a newsletter engine https://richshea.com/buildlog#bestraces-map-newsletter https://richshea.com/buildlog#bestraces-map-newsletter Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400 Two weeks of heavy shipping on BestRaces: a race map with 4,600 races and OSM-seeded course traces, a newsletter engine with a twice-monthly digest, and the debugging saga behind a silently failing email key. Plus the four indexing faults that were starving the crawl budget. PainBeacon publishes original research: Pain Care Deserts https://richshea.com/buildlog#painbeacon-pain-care-deserts https://richshea.com/buildlog#painbeacon-pain-care-deserts Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400 PainBeacon graduated from directory to publisher: 1,906 of 3,144 U.S. counties — 61% — have no pain management clinic. The study shipped with a county choropleth, a Connecticut-shaped data bug, and a Google Places billing surprise. Rich Shea Butter: a fact-first directory in a weekend — then the hard part https://richshea.com/buildlog#richsheabutter-launch https://richshea.com/buildlog#richsheabutter-launch Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0400 Empty repo to live site in a day: a custom static generator, a clean-clinical redesign, and every shea butter sold in the US compared on facts. The real product turned out to be keeping 15 Amazon listings honest. The AEO sprint: teaching search and answer engines who we are https://richshea.com/buildlog#aeo-sprint https://richshea.com/buildlog#aeo-sprint Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0400 Four days making every site legible to Google, Bing, and AI answer engines: a JSON-LD entity graph, Search Console and Bing verification, and deliberate AI-crawler policies — including two robots.txt problems our own CDN created. Losing the old site, rebuilding richshea.com in ten days https://richshea.com/buildlog#richshea-rebuild https://richshea.com/buildlog#richshea-rebuild Sat, 25 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0400 The Adobe account that hosted richshea.com vanished — so the rebuild became the excuse to do it right: one self-contained HTML file on a Cloudflare Worker, deployed by git push, with DNS migrated carefully around live email.