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SEAT-Lab Website — Development Guide

This guide covers how the site is built, tested, and published. For step-by-step instructions on editing content cards (people, publications, projects), see Editing_Document.md.

Overview

The site is a static GitHub Pages project. Pages are plain HTML with shared CSS and JavaScript.

Item Value
Live URL https://seat-lab.github.io/
Organization SEAT-Lab
Repository SEAT-Lab.github.io
Development branch main
Published branch publish

Repository layout

SEAT-Lab.github.io/
├── index.html              # Homepage
├── projects.html           # Projects page
├── publications.html       # Publications archive
├── styles.css              # Shared styles
├── script.js               # Shared behavior (nav, bios, projects, scroll)
├── publications.js         # Publications page (year sections, counts)
├── toc.js                  # Floating table of contents (publications)
├── sitemap.xml             # Search engine sitemap
├── assets/                 # Images (favicon, etc.)
├── docs/                   # Documentation
│   ├── Site_Development.md
│   └── Editing_Document.md
├── .github/workflows/      # Publish automation
└── local-support/           # Local dev tools
    ├── local_server.py
    └── requirements.txt

How pages share code

Every public page loads:

  • styles.css — layout, typography, cards, navigation, responsive rules
  • script.js — mobile menu, smooth scrolling, researcher bio toggles, project card collapse, progress bar, active nav highlighting

Additional scripts by page:

Page Extra scripts
publications.html toc.js, publications.js

Local development

Start the preview server

From the repository root:

python local-support/local_server.py

This serves the repo at http://localhost:8080 and opens a browser. HTML responses include a lightweight auto-refresh hook when file watching is available.

Optional: file watching

Install the optional dependency once:

pip install -r local-support/requirements.txt

With watchdog installed, the local server can detect HTML/CSS/JS changes and prompt a refresh automatically.

Git workflow

Daily work

Always develop on main:

git checkout main
git pull origin main
# edit files
git add .
git commit -m "Describe your change"
git push origin main

Pushing to main does not update the live site when GitHub Pages is configured to deploy from publish.

Publish to the live site

When changes on main are ready to go live:

git push origin main:publish

Alternatively, in GitHub:

  1. Go to Actions
  2. Open Publish Site Branch
  3. Click Run workflow (defaults: main → publish)

Scheduled publish

The Scheduled Publish Sync workflow runs on the 1st of every other month (UTC). It only acts in even-numbered months and only pushes when main has commits that publish does not already have.

You can also trigger it manually from Actions → Scheduled Publish Sync → Run workflow.

Common editing tasks

Task Where to edit More detail
Add a team member index.html → People section Editing_Document.md
Add a publication publications.html + homepage preview in index.html Editing_Document.md
Add a project projects.html + optional preview on index.html Editing_Document.md
Update contact info index.html → Contact section Edit HTML directly
Change site-wide colors/fonts styles.css (:root variables) Test all three pages
Update sitemap dates sitemap.xml After adding/removing pages

Adding a publication (summary)

  1. Open publications.html
  2. Add a new year section or append to the correct .year-content block
  3. Copy an existing .publication-detailed-card and update title, authors, venue, keywords, and links
  4. Update the floating TOC year list and counts (or rely on publications.js to recount on load)
  5. Optionally add a highlight card on index.html
  6. Update sitemap.xml <lastmod> if needed

See Editing_Document.md for full card HTML patterns.