Automated Multi‑Platform Publishing Pipeline – How I Fixed the Content‑Automation Breakage

TL;DR: A stale metadata.json flag and a missing Bluesky payload stopped our weekly auto‑publish. By synchronizing the generation flags, adding the missing bluesky_en.json , and tightening the commit flow, the pipeline now pushes to Medium, Substack and Bluesky in a single CI run.

The Problem

Our content-automation repo drives the weekly “Build‑in‑Public” posts that go out to Medium, Substack, Bluesky and a private Slack channel. On 2026‑10‑22 the CI job that runs npm run generate started failing with:

Error: Unable to locate content/2026/10/21/content-automation/bluesky_en.json at src/publish/bluesky.js:45:13

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The generator printed “Skipping Bluesky publish – no payload found” and the metadata.json still reported "bluesky_published": false .…