Ship’s Log: Social Deck Commissioned and the Fleet Grows

Ship’s Log — October 2, 2026

There are stretches in a project where it feels as though you spend days crawling through wiring, chasing permissions, arguing with APIs and wondering whether the damned thing is ever going to behave. Then there are days when you look back across the deck and realize just how much has actually been built.

Stormy Sailors has grown up

The main Stormy Sailors website has been through a substantial refit. The new Stormy Sailors Studio theme is in place, the site has been cleaned up for desktop and mobile, navigation problems have been hunted down, logos have been updated, and the Ship’s Log itself has been brought back into proper order.

The Tactical Pirate has also earned a proper berth aboard the site, complete with its own branding and a clearer home for the project and its stations and functions.

QR Forge has become a real system

What began as a QR-code project has grown into the Stormy Sailors QR Forge. The project now has its own repository and a much cleaner foundation, including the lost-pet and pet-rehoming work we have been building out.

That work has included pet profiles, microchip information, multiple photographs, better public-facing layouts, printable lost-pet posters, and a FOUND state so a successful reunion can be made obvious instead of leaving an old alert floating around forever.

There is still more to build, but QR Forge is no longer just an idea scribbled on the chart. It is underway.

Stormy Links joined the fleet

We also built Stormy Links: our own branded URL shortener. It generates compact five-character short codes, supports custom slugs, tracks clicks, has its own authenticated administration interface, and exposes an internal API for the rest of the Stormy Sailors systems.

More importantly, Stormy Links was connected directly to Social Deck. The URL Cannon can create a short link and drop it straight into a post without leaving the publishing screen. That entire path was tested end-to-end: create the link, redirect through it, and record the click.

And then there was Social Deck

Stormy Social Deck started as a simple idea: write a post once and send it where it needs to go. It is now a private, authenticated publishing console tied into Facebook and Instagram, with its own login protections and the Stormy Links URL Cannon sitting right inside the composer.

Instagram publishing came aboard first and worked properly. Facebook, naturally, decided that no voyage would be complete without making us crawl through the Zuckerberg Temple of Bullshit.

The Facebook Page token kept dying. We regenerated it. We extended the user token. We derived the Page token again. And it still came back with the lifespan of a mayfly.

The clue turned out to be sitting in plain sight: Stormy Social Deck had never been published as a Meta app.

The mayfly curse is dead

We created the required Stormy Social Deck privacy policy, completed Meta’s publishing requirements, and switched the app into Live mode on October 2.

Then we repeated the token process from scratch. A fresh user token was generated and extended through November 30, 2026. From that we derived a new Stormy Sailors Facebook Page token.

This time the result was different:

Type: PAGE
Valid: True
Expires: NEVER / no scheduled expiry

The new Page token was installed in Social Deck, the service restarted cleanly, and we ran the only test that ultimately matters: publish something.

Facebook: PUBLISHED.
Instagram: PUBLISHED.

Both sides of Social Deck are now operational.

Current ship status

Stormy Sailors website: operational.
QR Forge: operational and under active development.
Stormy Links: operational.
Stormy Social Deck: commissioned.
Facebook publishing: operational.
Instagram publishing: operational.
Meta app: Live.

There is always another project waiting somewhere over the horizon. For the moment, though, this one deserves to be entered properly in the log.

Think Like A Captain. Play Like a Pirate.