feat: add author pages listing everything an author wrote

[rsbh]

Stacked on #171 — base is feat/authors, so this diff shows only the author-page work. Retarget to main once #171 merges.

Authors registry

chronicle.yaml gains an optional registry, so an author's details live in one place instead of on every page:

authors:
  jane:
    name: Jane Doe
    bio: Writes about distributed systems.
    avatar: /team/jane.png
    url: https://github.com/jane
    email: jane@example.com

# page frontmatter
authors: [jane, Sam Patel]

A string matching a key expands to that profile; anything else still reads as a plain name, so an occasional contributor needs no config entry. A registry key and a same-named literal stay distinct authors, since slugs differ (jane vs jane-doe).

Pages

• /authors — everyone found in the content, with bio and page count
• /authors/<slug> — profile (avatar, bio, profile link, email) followed by their pages, grouped by content dir label and sorted newest first, undated last, then by title

Screenshots

The index is built once by buildAuthorIndex and reaches the client three ways, matching how API specs already work: /api/authors in server mode, /data/authors.json in static builds, and embedded in the SSR payload for /authors routes. That last one matters — without it these pages render blank with JavaScript disabled, which #166 established this project cares about. Verified in the served HTML: /authors/jane ships the name, bio, profile link, and all page links server-side.

Bylines now use the registry avatar image and link to the profile url when present, falling back to initials and mailto: as before.

Decisions

• Path collision — if a content dir is literally named authors, that content wins and author routes are skipped, so no existing site breaks. Covered by a test.
• Bylines don't link to author pages, per the entry points chosen for this feature; /authors is the way in. It's a two-line change if that should differ.
• Versioned sites — /v1/authors resolves, and the index reflects the pages the server knows about.

Testing

• bun test — 310 pass, 0 fail (20 new: index grouping, dir labels and fallback, sort order, registry profiles, slug collisions, route resolution including the content-dir collision)
• chronicle build, --preset static, and both scripts/smoke-test.sh runs (15-page crawl each)
• Checked the real output: /api/authors JSON, SSR HTML for both routes, the byline with a registry profile, and /data/authors.json from a static build

tsc --noEmit gains three errors: bun:test on the new test file, and two TS2883 h3 inference errors on the new API route — identical to the nine that api/specs.ts and api/page.ts already produce.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
chronicle	Ready	Preview	Aug 19, 2026 10:41am

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