Site credit · Case study

Building Lost Cabin Mine

I’m Tim Sawyer. I designed, developed, and engineered Lost Cabin Mine—turning a broad mix of historical research, fieldwork, maps, guides, and humor into a custom publishing platform built to grow.

Project at a glance

Role: Product design, development, and systems engineering
Platform: Historical research and field-storytelling website
Core stack: Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Sanity, GROQ, and Vercel
Status: Launched in 2026 and actively evolving

The challenge

Make the mystery credible—and the system manageable

Lost Cabin Mine needed to feel like one place while supporting very different kinds of material: documented history, ongoing legend investigations, route context, field reports, practical advice, comics, and character-driven stories.

The technical problem was equally important. The site needed an editorial system that could preserve consistent metadata, images, authorship, navigation, and search visibility without turning every new story into a custom development project.

What I owned

From requirements to production

Requirements & architecture

Translated a growing mix of legends, research, field reports, guides, and humor into distinct content types, publishing requirements, and reusable site patterns.

Interface & visual system

Designed the navigation, responsive layouts, typography, archive cards, article templates, hero treatments, and accessible interaction states used throughout the site.

Engineering & CMS

Built the Next.js application and Sanity Studio configuration, including schemas, GROQ queries, author relationships, image handling, pagination, maps, and content revalidation.

SEO & operations

Implemented metadata, structured data, sitemap and robots controls, internal-linking patterns, analytics, publishing checks, and monetization integrations.

Technical highlights

Next.js App Router pages with reusable archive and article patterns
Sanity content models for Articles, Legends, Campfire, Funnies, and Adventures
GROQ-powered queries, author relationships, and webhook-driven content revalidation
Responsive image handling for editorial artwork, maps, and detail-heavy source material
Leaflet-based mapping and self-contained interactive story experiences
Dynamic metadata, sitemap generation, robots controls, analytics, and structured data
Vercel production hosting with Git-based deployment and verification workflows

Outcomes

One maintainable platform supports five editorial sections with distinct purposes and a consistent reader experience.
Structured content and reusable page patterns reduce one-off development work and make publishing more predictable.
Published Sanity changes can update the site quickly through revalidation without requiring a full manual redeployment.
Search-friendly metadata, internal links, structured data, and crawlable archives provide a durable discovery foundation.
Documentation and repeatable checks make the system easier to operate, improve, and eventually hand off.

AI-assisted, human-directed

A tool in the workflow—not the person responsible for the work

I used AI tools to accelerate exploration, debugging, code review, drafting, and repetitive implementation. I defined the requirements, chose the architecture, directed the design, checked the research, reviewed the code, tested the behavior, and made the final calls. “AI-assisted” is a disclosure about the toolchain, not a substitute for ownership.

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