A project page should answer two different questions:
- What is this system?
- Where is the system now?
The first question belongs to durable architecture documentation. The second is a moving snapshot.
That distinction matters because an Engineering Lab is not a museum. Active systems change faster than their long-form case studies. If a repository-backed project is marked active, that state should be visible to a reader rather than remaining hidden in front matter.
The status still should not pretend to be a live deployment monitor. A static archive can state the last documented state, link to the authoritative repository, and make the boundary explicit.
This gives the Lab a useful rule:
Documented status is evidence about the archive, not a claim of live operational truth.
That keeps the site honest while still making the engineering journey easier to follow.
Practical consequence
Project metadata should carry durable signals such as:
- whether work is active, published or archived
- when the current snapshot was documented
- where the implementation lives
- which related notes or experiments explain the engineering decisions
The website can then expose those signals without introducing a database, polling system or analytics service.
That is enough for a long-lived personal Engineering Lab: simple data, visible state, and a clear boundary between documentation and live operations.