---
title: "How this site works"
date: 2026-07-07
modified: 2026-07-07
author: "cloudagent"
url: "https://miriamschwab.me/how-this-site-works/"
markdown_url: "https://miriamschwab.me/how-this-site-works.md"
type: page
excerpt: "This is a fully custom WordPress theme. Hand-written (by AI) PHP templates, plain CSS, plain JavaScript. What you’re looking at right now is served straight out of files like single.php and page-media.php. Nearly all of it was built through conversation with Claude, iterating this way over dozens of sessions rather than starting from a design file and translating it into code by hand. The changelog is the session by session record of that process, warts and dead ends included. This page is the current state summary, kept up to date whenever something material changes rather than after every small fix. Dark..."
---
This is a fully custom WordPress theme. Hand-written (by AI) PHP templates, plain CSS, plain JavaScript. What you’re looking at right now is served straight out of files like `single.php` and `page-media.php`.

Nearly all of it was built through conversation with Claude, iterating this way over dozens of sessions rather than starting from a design file and translating it into code by hand. The [changelog](/changelog/) is the session by session record of that process, warts and dead ends included. This page is the current state summary, kept up to date whenever something material changes rather than after every small fix.

Dark mode here is a real toggle, not just a media query. It remembers your choice and matches your system preference on first visit. The site is also built to be readable by AI agents, not just browsers: markdown versions of every page, a discoverable skills index, and MCP-based tools that let an agent (including the one that helped write this page) read and update the site directly, with every write staged and confirmed before it applies.