experiments

This repository is named experiments.

It was ravivasavan/play until 22 September 2026. GitHub still redirects that old URL here. The repository to clone and push is:

git@github.com:ravivasavan/experiments.git

https://github.com/ravivasavan/experiments.git

The public site is ravivasavan.com/experiments. It is served by the ravivasavan.com Cloudflare Worker, on the same connection as the rest of the site. GitHub Pages at ravivasavan.github.io/experiments is the origin the Worker fetches.

Art to share lives at ravivasavan.com/play. That folder is its own copy, graduated from Drift. The experiment, with its dials and dock, stays at ravivasavan.com/experiments/20260922/drift.

Experiments, out in the open.

Every play wears the same chrome: a header, a rail down the left for what changes the view, a dock along the bottom for the verbs, and a dials drawer on the right that minimises into a disc. AGENTS.md at the root is the taste as rules, for any agent or person working here; assets/CHROME.md is the contract underneath it. Read both before touching any of it.

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.

The experiments/ directory in this tree is a legacy public URL (/experiments/magnetic/ still redirects to Magnetic). New plays are filed at <YYYYMMDD>/<slug>/.

Teletext has one home

The play is 20260817/teletext/, built from poc/teletext/. The timeline entry uses that date. The 4 August and 10 August folders were redirects to it, and they are gone.

Where a push shows up

Public URL	What it is
ravivasavan.com/experiments/	This timeline, and every vibecoded play under it
ravivasavan.com/experiments/<YYYYMMDD>/<slug>/	One play
ravivasavan.com/experiments/20260922/drift/	Drift, the experiment. Dialkit and the bottom dock stay here
ravivasavan.com/play/	The art share, in play/. The same collection, without the experiment's dials or dock

Files in this repo stay at the root (/assets, /<YYYYMMDD>/<slug>, /play). The Worker prefixes experiment paths when it serves them. /play/ is the play/ folder and is not the experiment's URL. Drift's Vite base is /experiments/20260922/drift/. The art share is plain files and has no build.

Adding an experiment

1. The thing itself. Either host it here at <YYYYMMDD>/<slug>/index.html, or host it elsewhere and give the entry a url.

   A play that needs no dials can be plain HTML/CSS/JS with no build step. One with dials gets a Vite project at poc/<slug>/ that builds straight into its dated folder — the engine stays plain JavaScript in public/, and React is there only to render the DialKit panel. assets/CHROME.md §8 has the shape; copy poc/chroma/ and change the two paths in vite.config.js.

2. Three shots at assets/timeline/<slug>/, 1280×800, .webp. 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.webp", "calendar.webp", "rhythm.webp"]
   }

   • 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.

The committed bundle in the dated folder is what ships; poc/ holds the source it was built from, and node_modules is ignored. Anything bigger than a play — something with a server, a router or a real app behind it — still gets its own repo and links in by url.

What stays out of git

The root .gitignore covers every play, including a new poc/<slug>/ that has not copied its own ignore file yet.

• node_modules/, dist/, .vite/, and log files
• .env and other credential files: keys, pems, credentials.json, service-account JSON, .npmrc
• .DS_Store and editor metadata

Each poc/<slug>/.gitignore still ignores node_modules/ and dist/ for that project. Secret files were checked across the tree and the history of filenames: none are tracked. Leave them that way.

Plumbing

• Origin: GitHub Pages from main. The Worker on ravivasavan.com fetches it and publishes /experiments/ and /play/.
• .nojekyll keeps GitHub from running Jekyll over the files