The Calypso Archive

Approach

Click a star and the catalogue opens: year, authorship, ISWC, publisher, arranger connections, and — for the one song with both files uploaded so far — the actual scanned score and lyrics sheet, paged through on a canvas instead of dumped into a browser's native PDF toolbar. The entire site is static by design: Airtable exports to a JSON file at build time and the whole thing prerenders except one proxy route, with Cloudflare R2 holding every photo, scan, and recording behind a proxy that never exposes a bucket URL.

Getting There

• —Built the data pipeline before anything else — Airtable → registry.json — and shipped the first constellation, connections, and artist-card build in the same initial push, then put CI (Husky + GitHub Actions) in place before writing a single feature commit, so every later change was gated from day one.
• —Replaced the first force-ring layout with real geographic zones — each country's anchor, outline, and label position are derived from its own coastline geometry, so adding a new country needs zero hand-tuning.
• —Shipped publisher connections and arranger connections as two independent toggles rather than one bundled "connections" view — collapsing them would have implied arranging is a PRO relationship, which it isn't.
• —Scaffolded a per-artist page, then built Marjorie Johnson's page as the first real example — chapter navigation, a pinned audio player, an image carousel — deliberately left un-generalized into a layout system off a single data point. A second page, for Mighty Bomber (Clifton Fitzroy Ryan), followed the same pattern with a scrubbable chapter timeline and a locked, blur-and-sign-up gallery protecting family-donated photos still awaiting release.
• —Migrated artist photos, then detail-page media, out of static files and into Cloudflare R2 behind a private read proxy, so the browser requests /api/media/... and never touches R2 directly.
• —Built the /contribute pipeline: a public submission form writing into a separate staging bucket with its own write-scoped credentials, gated by Turnstile, notifying staff via Resend with a presigned review link that expires after seven days — nothing goes live without a human moving it.
• —Implemented a rebrand around a new palette and brand identity designed in-house by KSS founder Jesse Ryan, promoting the new accent to a CSS variable, then ran an axe-core accessibility audit and fixed what the rebrand had broken before calling it done.
• —Closed with a usability pass: a search typeahead that explains why each result matched, BMI/ASCAP filter pills on the artist card, opt-in logging for searches that come up empty, and mobile zoom fixes.