getlifeprotection.com (GLP blog + content pipeline)

What this is

The consumer-facing marketing site for Get Life Protection (getlifeprotection.com): a Jekyll blog that educates everyday people shopping for life insurance and routes them to a quote or a policy review. This repo is the site’s source. It is NOT the CRM (that is ~/agent-dashboard) and NOT the personal-advisor brand (no leverage/IUL-for-investors/generational-wealth framing). Write for a regular person who searched a question like “life insurance with COPD.”

The site is live and content publishes on a drip with no manual step per post, so a mistake in a draft (a dead internal link, an em dash, a priced dollar figure) ships on its own date unless it was caught before it entered the queue. That is why the rules below are strict.

Stack and how it ships

Jekyll (kramdown, GitHub Pages gem), deployed via GitHub Actions (not “deploy from branch”). Hosted on GitHub Pages; CNAME points the custom domain.
Permalink pattern is /blog/:slug/ (set in _config.yml). A post’s URL comes from its front-matter slug:, which can differ from the filename.
future: false in _config.yml is load-bearing: a post dated ahead of today stays hidden until a build runs on or after its date. That is what makes the drip work without a manual publish per post. Do not flip it.
Local build/preview: bundle exec jekyll build / bundle exec jekyll serve. Node pipeline scripts live in scripts/ and run on Node (nvm; the pinned version path is used by the skills, e.g. ~/.nvm/versions/node/v22.22.2/bin/node).

Where things live

_posts/: published posts (YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md). This is the source of truth for what is or will be live. Future-dated files sit here committed ahead of time and go live on their date.
_drafts/: the in-repo staging folder. sync-drafts.mjs reads here and moves publish-ready files into _posts/. The Thursday generator also commits its clean drafts here (drafts-only, never _posts/).
_data/content-index.json: a generated index of published posts (title, slug, url, date, image, sourceFile), rebuilt from _posts/ by scripts/build-content-index.mjs. Convenience, not the source of truth for what is live (see the internal-link rule; it can lag _posts/).
_review/: the generator’s review-branch home: _review/PR_BODY.md lists which drafts were clean / held for compliance / dropped on validation; _review/held/ holds the compliance-held copies.
_seo-reports/: the Monday SEO audit output.
content/glp-voice-and-rules.md: the canonical voice, compliance, and front-matter spec. The generator reads it. Treat it as authoritative for voice.
scripts/: the pipeline: generate-post.mjs (weekly generator), sync-drafts.mjs (the publish gate), build-content-index.mjs, review-pr.mjs, notify-discord.mjs, seo-audit.mjs, plus versioned skill reference copies (*.skill.md). scripts/ is excluded from the Jekyll build.
GLP Content/: a gitignored, Drive-synced working tree used by the Cowork Mac tasks. It holds blog-drafts/ (the Cowork writer’s output), _posts-live/ (the mirror of published posts, see below), plus research, newsletters, and reviews. It exists only in the MAIN working copy (~/getlifeprotection), never in a worktree, and never in the repo’s git history.

How the content pipeline works end to end

Two independent draft sources feed one human-gated publish path. Nothing auto-publishes; the drip only moves posts that a human already placed in _posts/.

Thursday generator (GitHub Actions, generate-week.yml). Runs scripts/generate-post.mjs --week at 14:00 UTC Thursdays, targeting the UPCOMING Mon–Sun. It is deliberately disarmed: it writes and commits _drafts/ ONLY (two layers enforce this), never _posts/. It pushes a review/week-of-<monday> branch and opens ONE review PR, then notifies Discord with the digest and any compliance escalation. On GitHub’s servers the Drive-synced GLP Content/ research tree is absent, so it falls back to the in-repo topic bank. Dedup is vs _posts/ only; drafts never count as covered.
Cowork blog-writer (Task 2, scheduled Mac). Runs ~2 PM and drafts 7 posts (Mon–Sun) into GLP Content/blog-drafts/. Its live-link source of truth is _posts-live/ (see the internal-link rule). Its SKILL lives at ~/Documents/Claude/Scheduled/task-2-blog-writer/SKILL.md.
Weekly review + image + publish (human-gated). Elijah reviews both sources (the glp-weekly-review skill), attaches hero images (the attach-images skill), then runs the publish path: move winners to _drafts/, run the REAL sync-drafts.mjs gate, rebuild the content index, future-date Mon–Sun, and commit. glp-weekly-publish (the one-command wrapper) is coming in week 2; for now the tail is run by hand.
Daily deploy cron (GitHub Actions, pages.yml). Builds and deploys at 13:11 UTC daily (~06:11 Pacific). Because of future: false, this is the build that makes each future-dated post go live on its own date. It ignores pushes that only touch _seo-reports/, _data/seo-snapshots.json, or _drafts/ so those commits do not trigger a pointless rebuild.
Monday SEO audit (GitHub Actions, seo-audit.yml). Runs 13:30 UTC Mondays, commits a report to _seo-reports/.
Thursday mirror job (launchd, com.elijahmang.glp-cowork-pull). Runs 11:00 Thursday (Mac local time), before the 2 PM Cowork run. It git pull --ff-only origin main on ~/getlifeprotection, then rsync -a --delete _posts/ → "GLP Content/_posts-live/" so the Cowork task reads the EXACT current published set. It fails loud in its log if either step fails. This job is the patch that fixed the Cowork link bug: Cowork could not see git/live truth, so the mirror hands it a fresh copy of _posts/.

The internal-link rule (07-18 hard-won; the most important rule here)

A blog link is safe ONLY if its target is a post that is actually LIVE right now. A 404 from a dead internal link ships silently on the drip. Resolve links this way:

Live = published on origin/main _posts, dated on or before today. Resolve a link by the target post’s front-matter slug: (the permalink), which can differ from the filename. Never build a slug from a title, and never guess one (e.g. “How Much Life Insurance Do I Actually Need?” has slug how-much-life-insurance-do-i-need, no “actually”).
Filter to date: <= today. Future-dated posts are committed in _posts/ (and mirrored into _posts-live/) but are NOT live yet under future: false. A file being in the folder does NOT mean it is live; linking a future-dated post is a dead link until its date arrives.
For the Cowork writer, the source of truth is _posts-live/ (the Thursday mirror of _posts/), filtered to date: <= today. Report the slug-count health line every run (“Loaded N live slugs; skipped M future-dated”); a count of 0 or far below expected means the pull/mirror failed and blog links are suspect. If _posts-live/ is missing or empty, fall back to product pages / /quote/ / /policy-review/ only and say so, never guess.
Never link against blog-drafts/, sibling same-week drafts, or a post’s title. A draft that loses its publish slot to the generator never goes live and 404s (three Cowork targets lost their slots and died this way).
Do NOT trust _data/content-index.json as the source of truth for what is live. It is a convenience index rebuilt from _posts/ and it can lag. Trusting it stale caused the 07-18 dead-link grind. Verify against _posts/ (or _posts-live/ for Cowork), not the index.

Every blog link must resolve to a real live post. /quote/ and /policy-review/ and the product pages (/life-insurance/term|whole-life|final-expense|iul/) always exist and are safe fallbacks; blog-to-blog links are the risky ones.

Voice and content rules (canonical in content/glp-voice-and-rules.md)

Read content/glp-voice-and-rules.md for the full spec. The rules a session must never get wrong:

Plain agent/human voice. Write like a knowledgeable friend explaining something over coffee, not an essayist being clever. Kill the AI tells: the “quiet = wisdom” tic, knowing-aside section openers (“Here is the part that gets glossed over”), the “not X, it is Y” seesaw as a rhythm, and several sections or posts opening with the same move.
No em dashes, anywhere. An em dash is an AI-writing signal. Use commas, periods, or restructure. (The weekly-review script counts them; any count > 0 is a fail to fix or drop.)
“Guarantee” is allowed only as a conditioned mechanism, never an outcome promise. The test: does the sentence promise the reader a RESULT (approval, rates, “will have coverage”) or DESCRIBE how the contract works with its conditions stated (policy in force, premiums paid, age/eligibility, contestability)? The first is prohibited; the second is fine. “Guaranteed issue” / “guaranteed acceptance within the eligible age range” as product terms are OK; “guaranteed coverage” with no condition is not.
No specific premium/price dollar figures (a coverage amount like “$1M of term” is fine; a monthly/annual price is not). No named rate classes (“Preferred Plus”). No hashtags. Soft CTAs only (gentle nudge to /quote/, /policy-review/, the phone, or a related post; never “act now” or “DM me”). “Most people don’t realize” at most once across a whole week.
Carrier references use qualifying language (“carriers known for,” “many carriers specialize in”), never “this carrier will approve you.” Carrier facts are never taken from model memory; if a draft asserts a carrier rule you cannot verify against ~/carrier-knowledge/, flag it rather than pass it.
Structure: reader-first opening (lead with the situation/question and answer the core question within ~200 words; no scene, metaphor, or literary cold-open), 800–1500 words, at least three H2 sections, primary keyword in the title and at least one H2, at least three internal links (≥1 product page AND ≥2 distinct already-live blog posts).

Front-matter shape (match live posts exactly)

layout: post
title: "<under 60 chars; includes the primary keyword>"
slug: <kebab-case; matches the intended URL>
description: "<140–160 chars, plain English; includes the primary keyword>"
category: "<e.g. Coverage Planning | Health and Underwriting | Final Expense>"
primary_keyword: "<main search phrase; also in the title and ≥1 H2>"
date: YYYY-MM-DD        # unquoted; THIS is the field the site builds from
image: "<a free images.unsplash.com URL>"   # never plus.unsplash.com

Filename is YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md and the date in the filename must match date:. Body starts immediately with the opening paragraph, NO leading # H1 (the layout renders the title). Use description:, not meta_description:. Generated drafts carry image_search: (a hint) instead of image:; the real hero is added at the image step before sync.

The publish flow (review → select → image → sync gate → future-date → index → drip)

Review + select with the glp-weekly-review skill: it gathers both draft sources, scores each against the criteria above, and proposes a Mon–Sun lineup with a pinned red-flag block. Elijah approves or overrides. Review only, never publishes.
Attach images with the attach-images skill: it finds a warm, authentic, DIVERSE images.unsplash.com hero per winner (natural mix, not a diversity quota; never default to all-white stock), shows Elijah clickable candidates, and writes only the image: line on approval. Never a watermarked plus.unsplash.com URL.
Sync gate: run the REAL scripts/sync-drafts.mjs (never bypass it). It validates and normalizes front matter, then moves publish-ready files from _drafts/ into _posts/. It refuses (non-zero exit) any draft missing title / slug / date / description, with a malformed date or slug, with no image:, or with a plus.unsplash.com image; it WARNS (does not block) on a duplicate hero image. It does not commit or push; it prints git status for your review. That review is the human gate. Run --dry-run first to preview.
Future-date Mon–Sun so each post publishes on its own day under future: false.
Rebuild the content index (build-content-index.mjs, which sync-drafts also does after a move) and commit it; the index should never drift stale.
Commit + push, then the daily pages.yml cron drips each post live on its date. Confirm the Actions deploy went green.

glp-weekly-publish (a one-command wrapper over review → image → sync tail, with a gated Discord report) is the week-2 build; it never arms auto-publish.

Hard-won gotchas (each cost a real incident or a long grind; don’t relearn them)

Trusting _data/content-index.json for what is live caused the 07-18 dead-link grind. It lags _posts/. Verify links against _posts/ (or _posts-live/ for Cowork), filtered to date: <= today, resolving by front-matter slug:.
A draft in a folder is not a live post. Future-dated posts sit in _posts/ and _posts-live/ before their date; sibling same-week drafts may lose their slot and never publish. Both 404 if linked as if live.
GLP Content/ is gitignored and Drive-synced, main-repo-only. Edits there are real and immediate but exist only in ~/getlifeprotection, never in a worktree and never in git history. The generator’s servers never see it.
The generator is drafts-only by design. It writes _drafts/ and opens a review PR; it never touches _posts/. Do not “fix” it to publish; the human gate is intentional.
docs/ and scripts/ are excluded from the Jekyll build (the optional- front-matter plugin would otherwise render every .md and parse Liquid inside, which broke the 2026-07-03 deploy). Keep internal .md out of the build path.
Skill reference copies live at scripts/<name>.skill.md (versioned), the live skill at ~/.claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md. Keep them in sync when a skill changes (byte-identical apart from the header comment).