Generally it’ll be used for monitoring uptime of another project. So even if that falls under “maintaining” it wouldn’t be for the project “in the repository”, unless you somehow combine upptime into the repo of the project you’re monitoring. But that could get very messy.

You can use `git checkout --orphan gh-pages` to make a branch with no parent commit. Put the upptime stuff there and maybe it just works in the same project. I haven't tried upptime, so ymmv.

That is irrelevant. Project to repository mapping is arbitrary.