Wanderer’s Logbook

Five of six ideas behind a tab

• Hidden chapters. Only one lens showed at a time; five of the six waited behind a tab, with nothing on the page to show what they looked like.
• A film with buttons. The intro's Play, Previous and Next duplicated what scrolling already did.
• Shrunk on a phone. Every figure was a fixed viewBox scaled to fit; the 1,000 × 660 Atlas drew at 0.39× on a 390-px screen.
• Very long walls. Fingerprint was a wall of 103 cards about 4,500 px tall; Letters a column of 22 pairs near 5,800 px.
• Colour doing two jobs. Language was orange and teal in one place, region colours in another.

The nightly job was erasing the essays

The Logbook stands on the chatbot's index, so a bug there was a bug here. Eight minutes after launch came a patch.

Six chapters, and a way between them

Contents names each chapter with its Roman numeral and a miniature of what it shows. Once you are inside, a small dock floats at the bottom of the screen — ‹ I Atlas › — and follows whichever chapter is in view.

• The chapter ids are the old ?lens= tab names, so every link to the first version still lands on the right chapter.
• On a phone the dock moves to the top, clear of the site's floating Ask button.
• It hides while an essay or the tour is open.

Islands grown from their own essays

The territories are not drawn by hand and not convex hulls. Each region's essays are painted as soft discs, and an SVG filter turns that cloud into land with a coastline — the same filter on the cover, the Atlas, the prologue and every entry page.

<!-- the "gooey" island, one per region -->
<feGaussianBlur stdDeviation={blur} />            1 · blur the discs
<feColorMatrix values="… 0 0 0 26 -11" /> 2 · threshold: land
<feMorphology operator="erode" radius="1.3"/> 3 · land minus it: coast
<feMorphology operator="dilate" />       4 · a ring offshore: shoal

Where two regions overlap they share a coast, which is the point: the map's borders are where one subject turns into another.

Lines cut from the archive

“Five sentences from five essays, shuffled until they read as one poem. Keep the lines you like and shuffle the rest.”

• A padlock beside each line keeps it; Shuffle the others redraws the rest, inking new lines in.
• The address bar is always a link to the poem in front of you (?poem= and ?lock=).
• Copy link and Save as image — a PNG of the card.
• Each line carries its year; tap it to open the essay it came from.

Two languages, one map

bge-m3 is multilingual, so a Marathi essay about a Sahyadri fort and an English one about the same climb land next to each other. Language is a property of the mark, never of the map.

• Detection by share of letters: a text is Marathi when its Devanagari letters reach half its Latin ones, so an English essay quoting one Marathi word is still English — and a title keeps its own language.
• Doubled by shape: English is an indigo circle, Marathi a saffron diamond, in every chapter — colour alone never carries the meaning.
• Set in its own type: Devanagari in Tiro Devanagari Marathi beside Instrument Serif, with lang="mr" for screen readers.

Sentences may ship. Paragraphs never do.

The essays live on Substack and WordPress; the Logbook only points at them. So the committed JSON may carry single sentences — each linking back to its essay — and nothing longer.

// src/lib/logbook.js — the rule
export const MAX_EXCERPT_WORDS = 30;

// src/lib/logbook.test.js — the guard
it("stays under 200 KB", () =>
  expect(raw.length).toBeLessThan(200 * 1024));

The test holds the committed file to both: no excerpt over 30 words, no file over 200 KB. The full text stays in the gitignored knowledge_base/. A line must also start like a sentence — a capital, a quote or a Devanagari letter — never on a digit.

One brief, full autonomy

Built in a single Claude Code session, with every step checked in a real browser: Playwright screenshots at desktop and phone widths, in light and dark, in both of the site's shells.

The Marathi essays vanished

The first screenshot of the new Atlas showed only circles: all seventeen saffron diamonds had gone. Caught before it shipped.

export const diamond = (cx, cy, r) =>
  `${cx},${cy - r} ${cx + r},${cy} ${cx},${cy + r} ${cx - r},${cy}`;

Save as image gave a black card

Verified by actually downloading the file in a headless browser, not by trusting the code path.

“Ask questions to clarify”

The music was nearly silent

Nobody listened to the first mix — the work happened in a container with no speakers — so it was measured instead.

volume=16dB,
sidechaincompress=threshold=0.02:ratio=6:attack=40:release=600,
loudnorm=I=-16:TP=-1.5:LRA=11

Gaps now sit at −43 to −34 dB under a voice at −18.5 dB; peak −2.6 dBFS.