The work after a page looks finished
Building Hicarl has reminded me that a website is more than its successful states. A project can be deleted, a request can fail, and a development server can stop loading a page that worked a moment earlier.
These situations are easy to overlook when most of the attention is on layout and content. Working through them has helped me think more carefully about what visitors should experience when something changes.
A deleted page is an expected state
After removing a project, an old link may still exist in a browser tab or bookmark. That does not mean the application has broken. It means the page is no longer available.
I adjusted the detail pages to handle that case as a normal not-found response. I also reviewed what happens when a collection is empty or has only one item. An empty collection needs a useful message, and a project should not recommend itself as the next thing to read.
Keeping development environments separate
Another issue came from development servers sharing generated output. Mixing files from different bundlers in the same cache produced missing-runtime errors.
Separating development caches by bundler and port gave each server its own working directory. It was a useful reminder to check the environment as well as the application code when an error seems inconsistent.
Adding a small window into service health
I added an API status page under Utilities to see the services Hicarl depends on: projects, blogs, About, authentication, and image storage.
The page shows recent checks, response times, and a history of recorded observations. I kept a distinction between a successful check and a claim of continuous uptime. When there is no measurement for a day, the history shows a gap.
A daily health endpoint is also configured for the deployment scheduler, so the site can record observations without someone opening the page.
A habit I want to keep
For me, reliability starts with small, understandable decisions: handle missing content calmly, protect saved work, make failures visible, and check the result in the browser.
Those improvements may be less visible than a new design, but they make Hicarl easier to maintain and more comfortable to use.
