Recover the /author URLs that WordPress and the import left broken

[ssavutu]

Follow-on from #86, found in the same logs. 68 distinct slugs were 404ing on /v1/authors/<slug>/articles. They turned out to be two unrelated problems.

1. Category archives under /author (31 slugs)

WordPress gave categories an author-shaped archive, so /author/crossword, /author/movies and /author/womens-basketball are indexed and still linked. This site serves all of that content — just at /<slug>.

25 are subsections (crossword, movies, sudoku, puzzles, satire, the-drawing-board, womens-basketball, philly-sports, …) and 6 are sections (news, opinion, sports, columns, entertainment, graduation). These now 301 to the page holding their content, via the cached taxonomy.

2. Real people filed under a different slug (7 slugs)

The import derives an author's slug from the WordPress login, and the logins don't agree with the names the site links by. Four distinct shapes are live:

URL that is linked	slug the CMS holds	why
ryan-keating	rkeating	abbreviated login
nayab-iqbal	by-nayab-iqbal	byline text used as the login
sanjana-bandi-2	sanjana-bandi	WordPress duplicate-account suffix
stefan-kusmirek	stefan-kusmirek-dev-thetriangle-org	email used as the login

Ryan Keating has 59 articles and his author page was unreachable from every URL that names him.

No pattern covers all four, and the next import will invent a fifth. So this matches on the display name, which is the one thing they have in common — the CMS holds the right name in every case, only the slug is wrong. It also keeps working after the ETL fix changes the slugs.

src/utils/authorIndex.ts builds that index from a paged /v1/authors sweep and caches it in process, on the taxonomyStore pattern: same TTL-plus-stale-fallback, same single-flight dedupe, same refusal to cache an empty result (an index with no authors would answer "no such person" for everyone). 875 authors, ~114 KB.

The ETL half is DrexelTriangle/wordpress-etl#63, but that only lands on a reseed and covers only the by- shape. These are live 404s now, so the recovery lives here.

Cost

Both checks run only after the author lookup has already missed, so a page that resolves pays nothing. Both refuse to act on an indefinite answer — getSlugKind returns unavailable and resolveAuthorSlug returns null when the CMS can't be read, leaving the 404 in place rather than inventing a redirect during a blip that then caches.

What still 404s, correctly

30 slugs are WordPress categories the CMS has no row for (music-entertainment, restaurant-reviews, exhibits, wordsearch) or WordPress handles with no author record (beeboop, abuckingham, carter, kasey-shamis-temp). Dead on both sides.

Verification

astro check: 0 errors. Dev server against the live CMS:

/author/ryan-keating         301 → /author/rkeating
/author/nayab-iqbal          301 → /author/by-nayab-iqbal
/author/sanjana-bandi-2      301 → /author/sanjana-bandi
/author/james-biernat-2      301 → /author/james-biernat
/author/michael-duffin-2     301 → /author/michael-duffin
/author/suhani-dheer-2       301 → /author/suhani-dheer
/author/stefan-kusmirek      301 → /author/stefan-kusmirek-dev-thetriangle-org
/author/crossword            301 → /crossword
/author/news                 301 → /news

/author/rkeating                 200   (real slug, untouched)
/author/sanjana-bandi            200
/author/erik-heyman-meltzer-870  200   (real numeric-suffix slug, not stripped)
/author/beeboop                  404   (genuinely unknown)
/author/abuckingham              404

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