- Expanded research pool to 9 topics (was 3), evergreen to 12 (was 3)
- Conference topics: added Photonics West, CIOE, NFOEC follow-up, year-end review
- Standards topics: 3 rotating variants (IEEE tracker, SFF-8024 registry, OIF CEI-112G)
- seededShuffle(): day-of-year as seed — stable within the day, different every day
- API response adds refreshes_at (next midnight UTC) for frontend countdown
- Dashboard subtitle shows 'rotates daily · next refresh in Xh'
- Hot topic cards now pass full title + angle into generateBlog() correctly
Hot Topics Engine (GET /api/hot-topics):
- 7 data sources: price movements, competitor alerts, hype cycle transitions,
news articles, conference calendar, research trends, evergreen topics
- Auto-discovers BREAKING/HOT/TRENDING/EMERGING topics
- Dashboard loads topics dynamically with urgency badges and source labels
- Click any topic → generates blog with that angle
Pipeline Lock (critical UX fix):
- Only 1 blog generation at a time (blogPipelineRunning flag)
- 'Pipeline Busy' toast if user clicks while generating
- Lock released on completion, timeout, or error
Dashboard:
- Static 3 cards replaced with dynamic hot topics grid
- 'Refresh Topics' button
- Topics show urgency color (red=breaking, orange=hot, yellow=trending, green=emerging)
- Auto-loads when Blog Engine tab opens