nginx: serve the canonical-forms essay on spiritwriter.ai

[aaronmarkham]

/computed-not-assigned.html deployed but was unreachable — it served the landing page instead.

Cause

spiritwriter.ai's server block never tries $uri:

# Everything else gets the landing page.
location / {
    try_files /landing.html =404;
}

Every URL on that host that isn't /static/, /favicon.ico or /healthz resolves to /landing.html. The block's own comment says so — "every URL serves /landing.html" — because when it was written, spiritwriter.ai was one page.

#18 added a second page to that host and never touched the vhost serving it. The page's rendering was verified; its reachability was not. The failure mode is a 200 with the wrong content, which is why it looked like a working link that went to the home page rather than a broken one.

Fix

An explicit location for the page:

location = /computed-not-assigned.html {
    try_files $uri =404;
}

Deliberately not try_files $uri /landing.html on the catch-all. That docroot is shared with news.spiritwriter.ai, so a $uri-first rule would also expose every news page and article on the marketing domain — a much wider change than this needs, with duplicate-content consequences across two hosts.

The trade-off is that each future standalone page needs its own location. If long-form pages become a category, the better shape is a /essays/ prefix and one location /essays/ block — but that changes an already-published URL (the spiritwriter-core README, docs/canonical-forms.md, and the essay's own canonical tag all point at the current path), so it isn't worth doing for one page.

Guard

A test reads the spiritwriter.ai server block and asserts each standalone page published for that host has a location that resolves to the real file. This bug is easy to repeat precisely because the symptom is a 200, and the existing tests all passed while the page was unreachable — they check what the generator writes, not what the server will hand back.

Suite: 72 passed.

Not verified

• The nginx config is not syntax-checked. Neither nginx nor a docker daemon is available in this environment. The new block is structurally identical to the existing location /static/ in the same file, but nginx -t has not run against it.
• The live URL was not re-fetched. spiritwriter.ai is blocked by this session's egress proxy, so the diagnosis rests on the config, which is unambiguous. Worth loading the page once after this deploys.

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