The project began as a role, not a repo. A Claude session was named the historian and told to build and maintain a site documenting every project: milestones, design changes, decisions, and progress, written like a designer’s and developer’s blog, with one section per project and the history backfilled from the repos.
The mockup round
Before any code, the historian showed layout options and colour schemes and asked a short list of questions. The answers set the shape of everything that followed:
- Home page: a board of projects, with the latest entries across all of them listed beneath.
- Project pages: the magazine format, a cover with the project’s story and its entries laid out as features.
- Timeline: one timeline across all projects, with filter chips to view one, several, or all. The owner asked for “nice sliding animations” as projects are added or removed from the view.
- Colour: all four proposed schemes stay available, Darkroom, Blueprint, Studio, and Field Notes. The site reads the OS light or dark preference to pick a starting scheme and falls back to Darkroom when it cannot.
- Scope: six projects at launch. One internal project was left out by name.
- Audience: public. That decision set the register for every entry, covered in how the historian learns things.
The name and the home
“Project Chronicles” was the owner’s pick from the names offered. It lives at trevorpaugh.com, a domain the owner already held on Cloudflare, and the owner asked for a repo to be set up for it on the spot.