Error: Added "Peer-Reviewed" to catalog badge without verifying. Papers are not peer-reviewed. Lesson: NEVER add claims you cannot verify. Every badge, qualifier, and label must be traceable to evidence. "Open Access" and "CC-BY-NC" are verifiable via the license file. "Peer-Reviewed" is not.
Error: Added "healthy" and "verified" qualifiers to marquee status bar. Lesson: Subjective assessments ("healthy resources") and unverifiable claims ("publications verified") have no place in public-facing content. Stick to binary, checkable facts: "7 demos live · 15/15 online."
Problem: Files displayed â€" instead of — (em-dash).
Initial (wrong) response: Wrote CP1252→UTF-8 conversion scripts that duplicated 499 files.
Root cause: R2 r2.dev serves files without Content-Type header. Browsers guess encoding (CP1252 on Windows).
Correct fix: The Pages Function proxy already added charset=utf-8. No content conversion needed — ALL source files are clean UTF-8 (650/650 verified).
Lesson: When you see encoding issues at the display layer, check the serving headers BEFORE modifying content. The content was never broken — the delivery was.
Error: Python subprocess.run with text=True fails on Windows when wrangler outputs non-ASCII characters.
Root cause: text=True uses system default encoding (CP1252), but wrangler outputs UTF-8.
Fix: Use encoding='utf-8', errors='replace' instead of text=True.
Lesson: Never use text=True on Windows without also specifying encoding='utf-8'.
Error: /papers/* matches /papers/ (empty trailing segment), causing redirect loops.
Lesson: Cloudflare Pages * matches zero or more characters including empty strings. Use :slug named parameters or explicit path matching for directory roots.
What worked: Switching from 497 pre-generated HTML files (via Pandoc) to a single paper.html template that fetches markdown from R2.
Why it's better: Front-end changes never require content regeneration. Content changes never require template redeploys. Living Papers development can iterate on the template independently.
Lesson: Decouple content from presentation early. The initial Pandoc pre-rendering approach created an integration tax that grew with every design change.
Error: Accidentally deployed from papers/ subdirectory instead of QWAV root, replacing the marquee page with the catalog.
Lesson: Always verify wrangler pages deploy is run from the intended directory. Check git status before deploying.