Two copies of the same article
One morning I opened the site and found the same article posted twice. Same title, same body, only the publish time differed, by 4 minutes.
The culprit: two clocks
The same publishing schedule was registered on both the Windows device and the Mac mini. One had been switched back on briefly for a check and then forgotten. Neither bot did anything wrong. When the time came, each one simply did its job faithfully.
The fix took three lines
• Before publishing, check 「does a post with today's date and the same slug already exist」.
• If it does, skip publishing and only log 「skipped」.
• Keep the schedule on one device only, and leave a note on the others explaining why it is off.
Before / After
| Item | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Duplicate posts in 2 weeks | 3 | 0 |
| How it was noticed | Bella spotted it by eye in the morning | The bot logged 「skipped」 |
| Cleanup time | About 10 minutes each | None |
What I took away
The scary thing in automation is not failure, it is diligent duplication.
Failure makes noise, while duplicates quietly pile up. So we taught the bot to ask 「has this already been done」 before 「what should I do」. For a small team, that one question replaces one person's worth of checking. Tonight I plan to open the schedule lists of both devices side by side.