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Back in February, I wrote about the playlist checker tool I had built with Claude that helped us monitor YouTube links in our Notion database. In that, I referenced the elusive "Official Archive" that we've mentioned over the years.

Freaking years. That's what it's been. I've rather consistently pushed this project over the horizon, constantly thinking if I just learn a bit more about Python, a bit more about Django, and submit myself to a bit more web development Tutorial Hell™, I'll eventually be ready to embark on the Official LCC | SaberComp Archive 9000™. Oh and in the meantime I must surely prototype everything possible in Notion.

Well after finally finishing my project of rebuilding my personal site from scratch on Astro, I thought about my next Claude-Code-assisted project. Regarding the Tutorial Hell™, I had previously been working my way through Writing [My] First App with Django, the Python web framework I've long had selected for the SaberComp Archive project. But with the general goings-on of life, said Tutorial Hell fell by the wayside. And one of my Claude testbed projects was having it look at that codebase and remind me where the hell I had left off.

So instead of once again embarking on figuring out how to code things one line at a time, I decided in the interest of actually shipping things, I would trust Claude enough to do the legwork for me. This would instead be a directing job for me, something I could even let churn while I tended to actual work work.

So a couple weekends ago, I created a rather large prompt, along with a handful of links to various web sources for Claude to follow, and my ideas of how I envisioned this whole archive to work—essentially an IMDb for SaberComp.

Within 20-30 minutes, it had a very basic thing up and running.

Freaking thing scraped two* web sources of entries, had some preliminary styling for the front end (and I mean preliminary; basically just confirming stuff can be published on the front end at all), and had some basic back-end admin control panel stuff. That's actually a cool attribute of Django—you get admin dashboards for damn-near free.

Feeding the Database

This was a cool part that I had long pondered and Claude just... did it. The entirety of LCC | SaberComp is scattered across the internet in various forms. The original Unofficial LCC Archive on PhiSpace. The Notion database I've been filling out, and the YouTube Playlists Christopher Spenceley has been building in recent years. All of these became insanely useful.

And Claude made them useful by building custom importers for each. This was something I knew would need to be done, and I knew I'd be able to learn it eventually through the various Python books and training sources I had... It's basic web scraping. But we're in the age of AI coding, so let's just freaking do this shit and be done with it.

*I mentioned two sources above, but then listed three. I would be remiss if I didn't mention how part-way through all this, Claude noticed that we seemed to be missing a lot of entries, at which point I fed it the YouTube playlists. Not only did it go "ooo, more data!", but it was able to notice overlap, notice naming conventions ("LCC III Entry 01 - The River"), and prepare the importer to not duplicate existing entries, and note what was a title vs entry number, as early LCC did.

Tables. Tables Everywhere

Something that happened early on that ended up being a huge blessing later is that I took great pains in explaining minute ways I envisioned the archive to function from a user standpoint. This in turn made Claude suggest certain database structures... which in turn made things more complex, but more flexible down the line.

We have about 22 tables within the database, things like Video, Person, Credit, Film, Entry, Channel, Role, Accolade, Submission, etc, et-cet-freakin-a. It sounds insane. But time and time again, as I've asked Claude about building out some new complexity, it's come back with "yeah that's totally possible, because we built it this way."

Reusing Tools

Having had other Claude Code sessions build out Python tools to do other things, I pointed Claude at that directory for reference. I don't think I've shared it here on the blog but we have a particularly slick one that looks at the raw credits text field that we ask for in the submission form, sends that out to the Claude API, returns it as JSON data, and plugs it back into the Notion database.

Welp, we also now have that tool built right into the Django archive. Raw credits, either imported from Notion or plugged in by us (or the future submission form), can be parsed by the Claude API and immediately create people in the database, match to existing people, and match to the closest existing film role. Freaking nifty, as the kids say.

There are a metric buttload more cool things happening under the hood. We'll talk about that eventually.

Keeping Humans in the Loop

One of the most important things about this whole archive effort is accuracy. Constantly along the development effort with Claude, the human factor has been stressed. Whenever something can possibly be figured out with the Claude API, or a Python tool, the final approval step is human-driven. While we might scan your credits with Claude, or scrape it from the internet, nothing ends up on the front end of the archive site without human approval.

A lot of the directing process on my part has been deciding how we classify something that comes from one source, how we classify it when it's AI-created, and how we indicate something is good to go. Then how do those various statuses get displayed, or not displayed, or not displayed and reported... on the front end.

All this to say... despite Claude Code doing a tremendous amount of coding work on this, I still have a very deep hand in guiding its development. There are extensive decision-making processes along the way... even simple things like "how does the 'person duplicate' scanning tool scale over time?"

One of the most intense things that has happened across this development process, I realize is something that I would've botched endlessly, and to great frustration, if I had been trying to do this without the help of Claude. Every time I realize we need to change some tables around, or completely rethink how we're tracking something, the database has to be either rebuilt or edited in a very careful way.

There was a night where we had to completely rethink a few things, and it turned into a 5-stage plan from Claude where each piece became about 30 minutes of back-and-forth decision-making. And each stage had to be done in a precise order so that all the data would be preserved through the migrations.

On top of this, Claude has something like 500+ tests it's running every time it makes a major change at this point. This is an area where I've never been proficient in my development work. And it's wild to see this AI system just preemptively do it. I don't know if it's a matter of Claude picking up that I know just enough... or it realizing I'm an idiot.

What's Next

At the moment I'm in a bit of a back-end stress-test. I'll go about doing some cataloguing; running the credits parsing tool, confirming things, adding roles, checking the front end, and going back to Claude when I find workflow issues that could be smoothed out.

Medium-term, there's the front-end styling, which will be fun and involve a lot more input from the SaberComp Council. With SaberComp 2026's deadline approaching, I plan on testing our submission process by personally plugging in everyone's entries as a sort of mock competition, seeing how the submission form + archive works in real time.

Long-term, I'm hoping we can launch a public archive in time for the 2027 season, so that we can use the fancy submission form—whereby your entry will land on the back end in an envelope for our review, and upon approval, be entered in the database automatically. This tooling is already working, but as I just alluded, has not been fully tested.

Your Help

Beyond that, when we do launch, I intend to have some simple tools for the community to help with the archive. Namely—a "submit a revision" link on any given page where you can tell us what we have wrong, or information you would like to see added.

My vision of the LCC | SaberComp Archive being a permanent home for 20+ years of lightsaber goodness is far closer than I ever envisioned. I'm pretty psyched to share more.

Other than all of that, I won't say no to monetary help to allow me to justify plugging away at this stuff like a crazed raccoon.

Current Stats

• 24 Competitions
• 519 Entries
• 641 people so far

Really hoping this all went off without too much of a hitch, since our launch day of January 1st is also the day we open up submissions for SaberComp 2025... a fact that never goes unnoticed on our Discord server.

I commenced the DNS switch late on December 30th. What would normally be a simple matter of unhooking the domain from SquareSpace and hooking it into Ghost via the Hover dashboard was complicated by the fact that I needed to change the name servers in order to route everything through CloudFlare first.

This is to facilitate some other changes I intend to make that CloudFlare will simplify for me. But 24 hours after the DNS change, we're still facing some issues with caches at various levels of the internet. I'm hoping by sometime tomorrow, the kinks will be worked out, and we'll have a smooth transition into the submission month.

Over the years since taking over the LCC and then later SaberComp website, my involvement in the web world has ebbed and flowed. I initially took control of the domain in 2014, while I was actually working full-time as a web developer, designing and coding WordPress themes for photographers.

The first versions of the LCC site handled by me, ended up as a WordPress site, with a premium theme I purchased and made work for our purposes. After some years, and leaving that WordPress theme development job and going back into visual effects, I fell out of practice on the web front. SquareSpace was really coming into its stride around then (2016 or so), so I moved the whole site over there.

For years I've maintained the site there. A couple years ago I made an effort to try to build out more content on it, but was finding myself limited by the engine we were using, and quite bored with the aesthetic. I could have switched it over to the new engine, which I did on my personal site, but my experience there confirmed I was really outgrowing their platform all together.

Enter Ghost

I've been on the lookout for a possible platform on which to rebuild the SaberComp front-end site, and definitely tried a few that I thought might be promising. But one that kept standing out to me in terms of back-end functionality was Ghost, which is where we are now. The ease of sending out blog posts as newsletters, and having a built-in RSS feed, was rather exciting for SaberComp, since we definitely have a heap of things to notify the community about throughout the year. And I've long been trying to make the website the de facto source of information.

I've also had an itch to get back into web development a bit more on my own, and between my personal site and SaberComp, I have a couple of test beds to really play around. I'll probably still see about developing my own custom Ghost theme for my personal site, but SaberComp was in more dire need of a makeover. So I started auditioning some premium themes; I had a whole group of tabs saved and I basically kept clicking through their demo sites, wondering how I might be able to utilize their various page templates for our site... and always thinking in the back of my mind: "well I can probably throw some custom CSS in there to really muck things up."

"Bright"

The winner, by virtue of me just deciding on a whim to pull the trigger and start building, was a theme called Bright, sold by Spiritix. It had a lot of the design elements that I'm drawn to at the moment, glassy divs, shimmering hover effects, and of course, some glowy bars.

The tricky part at first was figuring out how to control the theme in Ghost's dashboard. It's basically controlled by internal tags. You create a post the way you would a blog or news update, but assign it a special internal tag that the Bright theme then picks up and knows how to display it. There are a whole heap of #landing-col tags that allow me to populate the homepage with pretty much any type of section I could want... within the confines of what the developer built out.

Hacking it up...

The real fun came when I started showing what I was doing to the Council. Initial reactions were all very positive, but of course then the requests and ideas start coming in. And no one else has any inkling of the limitations I'm dealing with. The Call to Action bit is of course very cool, with the glowing bar shining down on the heading, which takes on our accent color. One of the immediate thoughts was "oh we should have those on other sections too!"

This sent me into a late-night binge of scouring the web inspector to see how the heck that glowing bar was even built. Luckily it was all just HTML and CSS. I was able to copy the whole div and paste it into an HMTL block on the welcome section, and then I was able to mess with the styling to make it wider, and give it a custom color. This all ended up being specified inline, right inside some <style> tags on the elements themselves. I am neither proud nor ashamed of this.

The real hard part was trying to figure out how to get it to expand out, as the Call to Action ones do. I finally had an "aha" moment when I was watching the Web Inspector and noticed there was an initial class assigned to the element, that was then removed by JavaScript when it came into view. Since I had initially done and inspect element on the already-visible bar, I never noticed this class. Once I applied that, we were in business. I can now throw one of these little lightsaber bars anywhere I want, and it'll activate on page load (if it's in view) or when it scrolls into view... or at least anywhere on the landing page. I have no reason to expect it'll necessarily work anywhere else.

12/31/25 Edit: Scratch that. Got it to work on the Submission page!

One Last Custom Touch

One thing we've had for many years on the website has been a live countdown. Amazingly, I've been able to use the same countdown service for almost 10 years, which would spit out an HTML block that I could throw into a footer or SquareSpace section.

However, said service finally seems to have taken a turn for the worse. They moved to a new design engine, which was actually much more restrictive than before, and I could no longer access my previous countdowns. So I decided to let ChatGPT take a stab at it. I presented it with the WIP homepage and told it I needed a persistent countdown that sat at the bottom of the page and to style it to match the site.

What you see at the bottom of the page is almost entirely what it came up with. I proceeded to work with it a bit and noodle with the code a little myself, but when I got stuck a few times (my JavaScript skills are very rusty), it was able to help me replace the correct lines with what I needed.

A couple things I particularly like about it:

• The time listed in the lower left is local to the user viewing the page.
• Mousing over said time will show a beautiful tooltip that displays the Pacific time we're counting down to.
• The state of whether the countdown is visible or hidden tracks across your session. As you navigate the site, it'll stay hidden if you've done so, and even through a refresh. Only when opening the site in a new tab will the state reset.

I've been tackling a rebuilding the SaberComp front-end site on a new platform: Ghost. The main things I'm looking to leverage are the built-in newsletter delivery, and the news feed, which should allow us a much more robust way to get the latest news regarding the competitions and general goings on around the community... to the community.

Figured I'd start the feed with something like this. Once we go live, people can go back and check these out :)