labs.watchthelight.org

The site for watchthelight-labs, live at https://labs.watchthelight.org.

Every public repo of the org gets its own pages: the README, every other markdown file, the releases, and each issue with its comments. Links between them stay on the site. Links to code files, downloads and other people's sites open GitHub or that site in a new tab, marked with an arrow.

• sitegen/fetch.py gets each README, markdown file, release note and issue from the GitHub API already rendered to HTML, so tables, callouts and code look the way GitHub shows them. A full build is about 270 API calls.
• sitegen/links.py rewrites github.com/watchthelight-labs/... links and relative .md links to the matching site page, points relative images at raw.githubusercontent.com, and marks everything else as leaving the site.
• src/page.html is the one shell (header, nav, starfield) and sitegen/render.py has a template for each page type.
• tools/og_image.py draws the 1200x630 preview images, one for the site and one per repo, with the name over the starfield. Space Mono is in tools/fonts/ under the SIL Open Font License.
• tools/check_links.py fails the build on a link to a page that doesn't exist, or on any home-page link that leaves the site. tools/lint_text.py checks the site's own text for em dashes and stock AI phrases.
• .github/workflows/deploy.yml deploys to GitHub Pages on every push and every 6 hours, so new repos, releases and issues show up without a commit. A repo that site.json doesn't place yet lands under "More".

The look is the old uprooted.sh style: near-black, square tiles, sage green, monospace, and a square-pixel starfield (src/starfield.js) whose three depth layers follow the cursor and the scroll. It stays still when the system asks for reduced motion.

pip install pillow
python build.py --cache        # --cache keeps API answers in .cache/ for quick rebuilds
python tools/check_links.py
python -m http.server -d dist