zeitgeber

A personal academic website, built around the thing I study: the daily clock. It comes with a CSV-based content management system. Edit your publications, news, CV, and repos in spreadsheets, push to GitHub, and a GitHub Actions workflow builds and deploys the site automatically. No databases, no frameworks, no CMS logins.

Live: orijitghosh.github.io

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What it looks like

• The site keeps circadian time. Your local clock is converted to Zeitgeber time (ZT0 = 06:00). The theme follows the sun (light 06:00 to 18:00, dark otherwise) unless you pick one, and the nav mark is a 24-hour dial whose hand moves through the day.
• A live fly arena on the home page. Simulated Drosophila walk, rest, fly and sleep on a schedule set by the time of day (morning and evening peaks, a midday siesta, sleep at night). Move the cursor to herd them, sweep fast to scare them off, click to startle them. Toggling the theme is a light pulse, so they startle then too.
• Two live research figures. A double-plotted actogram whose free-running period τ you can drag, and a hidden-Markov sleep-state model that steps through wake, quiet wake, light sleep and deep sleep while its transition graph lights up.
• Motion throughout: an intro counter, split-text reveals, scroll-lit statements, a scroll-driven marquee, magnetic buttons, a custom cursor, tilting repo cards and circular page transitions (cross-document View Transitions, with a curtain fallback).
• Publications get a filter pill, live search with highlighting (press /), and a year histogram that doubles as navigation. Link a search with publications.html?q=sleep.
• A tiny shell. Press ` anywhere (or use the key in the footer), then type help.
• Everything respects prefers-reduced-motion, works with a keyboard, and prints cleanly. The amber and violet palette separates by luminance as well as hue, so it holds up for colour-blind readers.
• No frameworks and no build step for the front end: plain CSS and classic defer scripts, so opening index.html straight from disk works.

Pages

Page	Content source
About (home)	config.yaml (bio, tags) + data/news.csv + data/publications.csv (selected)
publications	data/publications.csv — auto-sorted by year, author name auto-bolded
repositories	data/repositories.csv — language color dots from config
cv	data/education.csv + data/experience.csv + data/awards.csv
teaching	data/service.csv — category column splits into editorial/service/mentoring/teaching

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Fork it for yourself

Prerequisites

• Python 3.8+
• Git

Setup

git clone https://github.com/orijitghosh/orijitghosh.github.io.git my-site
cd my-site

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate      # Windows: venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Make it yours

1. Edit config.yaml — replace my name, bio, email, affiliation, tags, Google Scholar URL, etc. with yours.

2. Edit the CSV files in data/ — they're already there with my data as examples. Replace the rows with your own:

   File	Columns
   publications.csv	year, title, authors, venue, url, selected, note
   news.csv	date, description
   repositories.csv	name, description, url, languages
   education.csv	start_year, end_year, degree, institution, details
   experience.csv	start_year, end_year, title, institution, details
   awards.csv	year, description
   service.csv	category, description, order

   Keep the header row, replace everything below it. See docs/CSV_FORMAT.md for the full spec with examples.

3. Build:

   python build.py

4. Preview — open index.html in your browser.

Deploy to GitHub Pages

Create a repo named yourusername.github.io on GitHub, then:

git add .
git commit -m "Initial deploy"
git branch -M main
git remote set-url origin https://github.com/yourusername/yourusername.github.io.git
git push -u origin main

Then go to your repo Settings > Pages > Source and select "GitHub Actions" (not "Deploy from a branch"). The included workflow (.github/workflows/build-deploy.yml) handles the rest — it installs Python, runs build.py, and deploys the output.

Your site will be live at https://yourusername.github.io within a couple minutes.

Day-to-day workflow

# edit a CSV or template, then just push:
git add .
git commit -m "Add new publication"
git push

GitHub Actions runs build.py automatically on every push. You don't need Python installed to update the site — just edit files and push.

If you want to preview locally before pushing, you can still run python build.py and open index.html in your browser.

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CSV conventions

A few things that might not be obvious:

• Authors in publications.csv are semicolon-separated (Ghosh Arijit; Smith John). Names matching author_bold_patterns in config.yaml get auto-bolded.
• selected: yes in publications — those show up on the home page. Leave blank otherwise.
• Pipe | separates bullet points in the details column of education/experience CSVs. Did A|Did B|Did C renders as a bulleted list.
• category in service.csv must be one of: editorial, service, mentoring, teaching. Controls which section the item appears under.
• date in news.csv is YYYY-MM format (e.g., 2026-05). Auto-formatted to "May 2026" in the output.
• HTML is allowed in most description fields — links, <em>, <code>, etc. If the cell contains commas, wrap it in double quotes.

Customization

Colors and theme

All colours are CSS custom properties at the top of assets/css/site.css, with one block for the night (dark) palette and one for the day (light) palette. The main ones are --bg, --ink, --sun (the amber accent), --dusk (the violet accent) and --fly.

Language colors for repo cards

config.yaml has a language_colors map (GitHub-style). If you add a repo with a language not in the list, it falls back to gray. Add new ones:

language_colors:
  Julia: "#a270ba"
  Matlab: "#e16737"

Adding pages

The Jinja2 templates are in templates/. Every page extends base.html.j2 (nav, full-screen menu, footer, cursor and page-transition curtain), and small shared pieces (arrows, section eyebrows, the dial mark) live in _macros.html.j2. To add a new page:

1. Create templates/newpage.html.j2 with {% extends "base.html.j2" %} and fill the content block
2. Add a row to the PAGES list in build.py
3. Add an entry to nav_items at the top of base.html.j2

Swap out the profile image

Replace assets/profile.webp and assets/profile-720.jpg (a 720×720 fallback). Any square-ish image works; it's clipped to a circle. A photo on a white background looks best, since it's blended onto the portrait disc.

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Project structure

.
├── config.yaml              # personal info, display settings, language colors
├── build.py                 # reads CSVs + config, renders Jinja2 templates to HTML
├── requirements.txt         # jinja2, pandas, pyyaml, pytest
│
├── data/                    # YOUR content — replace with your own
│   ├── publications.csv
│   ├── news.csv
│   ├── repositories.csv
│   ├── education.csv
│   ├── experience.csv
│   ├── awards.csv
│   └── service.csv
│
├── templates/               # Jinja2 source templates
│   ├── base.html.j2         # shared layout: nav, menu, footer, cursor
│   ├── _macros.html.j2      # arrows, eyebrows, dial mark
│   ├── index.html.j2
│   ├── publications.html.j2
│   ├── repositories.html.j2
│   ├── cv.html.j2
│   ├── teaching.html.j2
│   └── 404.html.j2
│
├── assets/
│   ├── css/site.css         # all styling: palettes, layout, motion, print
│   ├── js/site.js           # core: theme + ZT clock, reveals, cursor, transitions, intro
│   ├── js/flies.js          # home page fly arena + ZT dial
│   ├── js/research.js       # actogram + sleep-state model
│   ├── js/publications.js   # filters, search, year histogram
│   ├── js/terminal.js       # the ` shell
│   ├── profile.webp / profile-720.jpg
│   └── CV_AG_05192026.pdf   # downloadable CV (swap with your own)
│
├── favicon.svg
├── 404.html
│
├── tests/
│   └── test_build.py        # tests for the build script
│
├── docs/                    # guides for editing, deploying, troubleshooting
│   ├── SETUP.md
│   ├── UPDATE.md
│   ├── DEPLOYMENT.md
│   ├── TROUBLESHOOTING.md
│   ├── TUTORIAL.md
│   └── CSV_FORMAT.md
│
├── .github/workflows/
│   └── build-deploy.yml     # GitHub Actions: auto build + deploy on push
├── LICENSE                  # GPL-3.0
└── README.md                # you're here

The data/ folder contains my actual content as working examples. Fork the repo, replace the CSVs with your own data, and you're good to go.

Tests

pytest tests/test_build.py -v

Covers CSV parsing, author bolding, template rendering, edge cases. Useful if you modify build.py.

License

GPL-3.0. See LICENSE.

If you use this as a starting point for your own site, a link back is appreciated but not required.