374 commits to Rocheport Times from Mon 20 Jul to Sun 26 Jul 2026. The MR340 is a 340-mile canoe and kayak race down the Missouri River that passes Rocheport, and it started on 28 July. This week I built the paper’s own race tracker from nothing: a live leaderboard, a replay map of the 2024 field on a GPU-rendered vector basemap with 3D terrain, a cinematic follow camera, and a phone-first find-a-boat page. Alongside it, an SEO emergency (one page indexed and 198 dead URLs) got a code-owned redirects module.
- Reverse-engineered the race’s public tracker feed and built a tracker module: leaderboard and checkpoint watch from a 3-minute server-side cache with stale fallback, pinned by 27 fixture checks.
- Moved the replay map from Leaflet to MapLibre GL: vector basemap with no API key, optional 3D terrain and buildings, a satellite toggle, a cinematic tour that chases a chosen boat, and checkpoints placed at real ramp coordinates.
- Rebuilt the 2024 field from 405 real GPS tracks, snapped to the official river-channel line from a 2012 survey, and lazy-loaded it so the page shrank from 1.45 MB to 360 KB.
- Added live mode: a server-side proxy at a REST endpoint, a client engine that polls it, and a mobile /find page in three tiers that auto-throttles on slow connections.
- Fixed the indexing emergency: a redirects module in code mapping 207 dead URLs (81 permanent redirects, 112 gone), no loops or chains, with a deploy guard that verifies them.
- Stopped the deploy from shipping the staging site’s plugins over production’s, purged 1,760 stray macOS metadata files from the host, and published a DMARC record for the paper’s email.