Queen of San Diego — Tech Blog

Under the hood at queenofsandiego.com

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Fixing Proposal Payment Terms and Rendering Dynamic HTML Email Blasts at Scale

This post covers a recent infrastructure and content management fix that revealed gaps in our proposal workflow and email rendering pipeline. We identified inconsistent payment term definitions across S3-hosted proposal documents and built a solution for rendering HTML email templates dynamically while maintaining audit trails across our dashboard system.

The Problem: Inconsistent Payment Terms Across Proposals

Our charter booking proposals are stored as HTML files in s3://queenofsandiego.com/proposals/ and served to clients. During a routine audit, we discovered that two versions of a proposal for the same client (Jada Charter) had conflicting payment terms:

  • jada-charter-proposal-ewing.html: specified "50% deposit required"
  • jada-charter-proposal-sue.html: contained a contradiction between "Deposit held in all cases" and a weather-dependent refund clause

These inconsistencies created legal and operational risk. The fix required updating both S3 objects and tracking the changes through our task management dashboard.

Technical Details: S3 Sync and Content Verification

Our deployment strategy involves three layers:

  • Local source of truth: /Users/cb/Documents/repos/sites/queenofsandiego.com/proposals/
  • S3 staging: s3://queenofsandiego.com/proposals/
  • CDN distribution: CloudFront distribution serving the proposals domain

We used a grep-based verification workflow to locate the problematic terms:

grep -n "deposit\|payment\|refund\|weather\|500\|balance" \
  /Users/cb/Documents/repos/sites/queenofsandiego.com/proposals/jada-charter-proposal-sue.html

This identified line 525, where the weather refund clause contradicted the deposit language. We corrected both documents locally, then deployed to S3:

aws s3 cp /tmp/ewing-proposal.html \
  s3://queenofsandiego.com/proposals/jada-charter-proposal-ewing.html \
  --content-type text/html

For content verification before deployment, we pulled the S3 version back to local and re-ran grep to confirm the terms were now consistent. This catch-and-verify pattern prevents silent failures in content distribution.

Infrastructure: Dashboard Integration for Audit Trails

Beyond S3 updates, we maintain a centralized dashboard at https://progress.queenofsandiego.com/state.json that tracks task status and notes. When changes are made to client-facing documents, we log them via our Python tooling:

python3 /Users/cb/Documents/repos/tools/update_dashboard.py add-note t-f20bc5a4 \
  --text "Payment terms fixed on both proposals. Sue and Ewing versions now consistent."

This command pushes a structured note to task t-f20bc5a4 in the dashboard. The dashboard aggregates notes across multiple agent sessions and serves as the single source of truth for what's been deployed. The state.json endpoint is consumed by our task runners and CLI tools:

curl -s 'https://progress.queenofsandiego.com/state.json' | python3 -c "
import json, sys
data = json.load(sys.stdin)
for task in data['tasks']:
    if 'payment' in task.get('notes', '').lower():
        print(f\"Task {task['id']}: {task['status']}\")
"

This pattern allows engineers to query deployment state without hitting databases directly.

Email Rendering Pipeline: Bob Dylan Campaign Preview

A secondary requirement emerged during this session: render an HTML email preview for a marketing campaign. The email template lives at /Users/cb/Documents/repos/sites/queenofsandiego.com/email_bobdylan_fathersday_2026.html. Since our email templates need to be reviewed in a browser before sending (for CSS rendering, image loading, and link validation), we set up a temporary preview mechanism:

aws s3 cp /Users/cb/Documents/repos/sites/queenofsandiego.com/notes/email_bobdylan_fathersday_2026.html \
  s3://queenofsandiego.com/email-previews/bobdylan-2026-preview.html \
  --content-type text/html --acl public-read

By uploading to a separate S3 prefix and making the object public-read, we created a shareable URL without exposing the production email sending infrastructure. This preview bucket is distinct from proposal assets, allowing separate lifecycle policies and access controls.

Key Decisions and Trade-Offs

Why not version-control proposals in Git? Our proposals contain client-specific data (names, booking dates, pricing) that would create merge conflicts. S3 with local copies as source-of-truth provides better isolation while still maintaining audit trails through the dashboard.

Why grep instead of regex in a parser? HTML parsing with libraries like BeautifulSoup would be more robust, but for quick content verification during deployment, grep on known keywords provides fast feedback with minimal dependencies. For production content validation, we'd implement a proper parser and schema validator.

Why the public-read ACL on email previews? Email templates often reference external images and stylesheets. A public-read object in S3 allows those resources to load without authentication. In production, we restrict this to a specific CloudFront distribution via Origin Access Identity (OAI) to prevent direct S3 access.

What's Next

This session exposed three gaps we're addressing:

  • Schema validation: Implementing a proposal validation step that checks for required fields (deposit terms, cancellation policy, weather clauses) before S3 upload
  • Email template testing: Building a headless Chrome renderer to automatically test email templates across client mail clients (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail)
  • CloudFront cache invalidation: Currently manual. We're automating invalidation of affected distributions when proposals change via aws cloudfront create-invalidation

The session logs show multiple dashboard updates tracking follow-ups with Pat Steigerwald and other prospects. The pattern of local edit → S3 upload → dashboard note → follow-up task is working well for our small team, but as proposal volume scales, we'll need to move this into a proper CMS with workflow states and approval gates.

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