The calendar already had a field called description_source. A festival description could carry the value SoCalNomad, which looked like a useful way to distinguish the site’s own material from information supplied elsewhere.
Then I wanted a sitemap that specifically identified descriptions I had written myself.
The existing field could not answer that question. Every festival description carried the same source value, whether I had written the text or an AI-assisted session had drafted it. Saving a description also stamped it with that source. The field recorded where the material was maintained, with no reliable distinction between its authors.
That ambiguity mattered because the directory mixes several kinds of material: provider records, AI-generated biographies and descriptions, and some writing of my own. They can all be published by SoCalNomad while having different origins.
Recording A Different Fact
The change added an explicit flag to each kind of directory entry. Festivals and venues received description_original. Artists received bio_original.
In this system, the flag has a specific meaning: I wrote that description or biography myself. It is set when that text enters the directory. A light edit to my writing preserves the designation. Text drafted during an AI-assisted session does not receive it.
The flags default to false. Adding the columns therefore did not retroactively declare the whole directory my original writing. An entry has to be deliberately identified before it can enter this group.
A false value has a narrower meaning than a complete authorship history. It says the entry has not been designated as my own writing. It does not identify every contributor or explain how a draft was assembled. That would require a more detailed provenance model than this change provides.
The original source field can continue doing its existing job. The new fields answer the additional question without asking one label to carry both meanings.
A Timestamp For The Words
Authorship was only part of the sitemap problem. The database also needed a useful date for the text.
An entity’s general update timestamp can move when a fetcher refreshes its record. That activity may change operational data without changing a sentence of the description. Using that timestamp in a writing-focused sitemap would make routine maintenance look like an editorial revision.
The migration added separate description and biography timestamps. Database triggers compare the old and new text whenever those fields are updated. The writing timestamp advances when the words actually change. Saving the same text again leaves it alone.
Keeping that comparison in the database means updates to the prose use the same rule regardless of which application sends them. The timestamp describes a text change rather than the schedule of whichever process last touched the surrounding record.
It still needs an honest starting point. A newly added timestamp cannot reconstruct an undocumented editing history. The initial confirmed description was seeded using the existing record timestamp; subsequent prose changes follow the new rule.
One Confirmed Entry
The resulting /sitemap-originals.xml draws from active festivals, venues and artists whose authorship flag is set. Each entry uses the corresponding text timestamp for its modification date. The calendar’s sitemap index includes it alongside the broader directory sitemaps.
As of November 13, 2026, it contained one confirmed entry: the Ohana festival description.
That count is specific to the calendar’s descriptions and biographies. The designation says nothing about authorship of the documentation-derived posts on srand.info, which are synthesized from project records with AI assistance.
There is also no search-performance result to report from adding this sitemap. The implementation makes a particular group of pages identifiable and gives their text a more meaningful revision date. Whether search engines crawl or index those pages remains a separate observation.
The continuing workflow is small: when I supply a description I wrote myself, record that designation as the text is added. The sitemap can then reflect the writing already present in the directory, even while most of the directory continues to be assembled through other means.