chore(content): clear the rot — dead links, held drafts, orphan sections

[avrabe]

Walked the content tree after noticing duplicates and unpublished material sitting there. Four separate kinds of rot, one of them breaking the local build.

The build was broken locally

content/preprints/ was an untracked leftover from the preprints → publications rename. The surviving content/publications/oracle-gated-agent-loops.md differs from it by exactly one line — the aliases = ["/preprints/oracle-gated-agent-loops/"] added to keep the old URL alive. zola build failed with a path collision on any tree that had it. Removed (it was never committed, so it is not in this diff — noted for the record).

Six dead internal links, CI green over all of them

link	from	why
/docs/guide/architecture/	/docs/ (in the nav)	never written
/docs/guide/verify/	/docs/	never written
/docs/guide/trace/	/docs/	never written
/docs/guide/compliance/	/docs/	never written
/blog/rivet-v0.1.0/	2 posts	slugifies to rivet-v0-1-0
/blog/2026-05-01-cross-language-lto-…/	1 post	URLs are date-free

Four of the five bullets under The Guide on the Documentation page were 404s.

CI runs zola build, which does not validate links.

The gate that would have caught it is vacuous here

zola check --skip-external-links looks like the obvious fix. It isn't — measured with a deliberately dead /docs/guide/compliance/ in the tree:

$ zola check --skip-external-links ; echo $?
0

It only understands Zola's @/path.md internal-link syntax; our content uses raw absolute hrefs, which it treats as unchecked.

So this adds scripts/check-internal-links.py instead, verified red-first:

clean tree          -> 94 links, 0 dead, exit 0
+1 dead link        -> 95 links, 1 dead, exit 1     <- the control
reverted            -> 94 links, 0 dead, exit 0

It also fails if it matched zero links — Zola minifies output and emits unquoted attributes (href=/docs/), so the naive href="([^"]+)" pattern matches nothing and reports a triumphant zero. That is how the first version of this check fooled me.

Two drafts that rotted for 112 and 101 days

Deleted witness-wasm-mcdc and attestation-chains-trustmee-to-cerisier.

The interesting part is why the second one rotted. blog-autopublish runs daily and is 40/40 success, and reported both identically:

Held (2):
- ∞ · attestation-chains-trustmee-to-cerisier
- ∞ · witness-wasm-mcdc

But they were held for different reasons: witness-wasm-mcdc carried an explicit hold = true — a decision. attestation-chains had no hold and no ready — an omission. One glyph for both, so the only surface anyone would check made a forgotten flag look like a deliberate park.

Fixed two ways:

• the report splits the bucket into held on purpose (hold = true) and not yet marked ready = true, the latter with a note saying it will never publish until someone acts. Verified with a fixture in each bucket.
• the workflow header no longer documents a contract the script does not implement. It said draft = true + no hold was enough; scripts/blog-autopublish.py requires ready = true. The opt-in design is right — the stale comment was not.

Three empty sections in the sitemap

/gale/, /rivet/, /spar/ — each an _index.md reading "Artifacts from the X project, exported by rivet" with zero pages. Nothing populates them; /reports/ (#59) is what ships project evidence now. Unlinked from nav and from every page body, yet all three were in sitemap.xml.

Smaller

• Filename dates now match frontmatter on three posts (overdoing-… 22→29 Apr, variant-pruning 24→30 Apr, verified-os-on-silicon 15→18 Jul). URLs are date-free, so nothing moved and no alias is needed.
• /guides/verification-guide/ — a 16 KB reference reachable only from a footnote in the March 15 post — is now linked from the Documentation page.

Verification

zola build   -> 39 pages (0 orphan), 14 sections -> 11 sections
link check   -> 75 pages, 94 internal links, 0 dead

Still open, not touched here: content/talks/ is a leftover from the same talks → publications rename — no _index.md, holding one draft (speaker notes, 14 days old, not yet rotting).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01G5qpB7zvxLvdrvn5YRyj4R