play.ravivasavan.com

Experiments, out in the open.

Static site served by GitHub Pages from main (root). Every push deploys.

The home page is a horizontal timeline built from assets/timeline/experiments.json — the rail itself is never hand-maintained. The one exception is the <noscript> fallback in index.html, a plain list of links for visitors and crawlers without JS: keep it in step with the JSON when you add, remove or hide an entry.

Adding an experiment

1. The thing itself. Either host it here at <YYYYMMDD>/<slug>/index.html (plain HTML/CSS/JS, no build step), or host it elsewhere and give the entry a url.
2. Three shots at assets/timeline/<slug>/*.png, 1280×800. They render as a scattered stack ~210px wide, so favour whole-screen views over detail crops. Mixing light and dark reads well.
3. An entry in assets/timeline/experiments.json:

   {
     "slug": "arena-stats",
     "name": "Arena Stats",
     "date": "20260803",
     "description": "Every block you've made on Are.na, counted",
     "status": "live",
     "tech": "React, Are.na v3 API, no backend",
     "glyph": "chart",
     "url": "https://ravivasavan.github.io/arena-stats/",
     "shots": ["overview.png", "calendar.png", "rhythm.png"]
   }

   • date is the filing date, YYYYMMDD. It places the entry on the rail. Several experiments can share a date — the rail stretches that day to fit them.
   • url is optional; without it the entry links to /<date>/<slug>/.
   • status is live, tinkering, or retired — it colours the dot.
   • glyph names a key in the GLYPHS map in index.html. Add the Lucide path data there first, or the entry falls back to its initial.
   • hidden is optional. Set it to true to unlist an entry: the rail skips it, but the folder and shots stay put and the thing itself is still reachable at its own URL. Remove it from the <noscript> list too, or it stays visible without JS. Remove the flag to put it back.
4. Commit + push.

Anything that needs a framework or build step (Next, Vue) gets its own repo and links in by url.

Plumbing

• DNS: Cloudflare, CNAME play.ravivasavan.com → ravivasavan.github.io (DNS-only so GitHub can provision TLS)
• Custom domain + HTTPS: repo Settings → Pages
• .nojekyll keeps GitHub from running Jekyll over the files