lynkrobotics.org

The website for LYNK Robotics, FIRST® Robotics Competition Team 9496, operating under Inspire Carolina, Inc.

Static site built with Eleventy, published to GitHub Pages at https://www.lynkrobotics.org.

Want to change something on the site? Start with GUIDE.md — a walkthrough from nothing to a published change. No technical knowledge needed.

Working on the code? CONTRIBUTING.md. Hosting and permissions? SETUP.md.

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The everyday workflow

Ask for a change; review it; merge it. Nothing to install, nothing to run.

  ask Claude for a change
          │
          ▼
  Claude pushes a branch and opens a pull request
          │
          ├──▶ Claude's reply links a page of screenshots,
          │    every affected page at desktop and phone width
          │
          └──▶ Cloudflare comments a live preview URL on the PR,
               the real site, clickable, ~1 minute later
          │
          ▼
  merge the pull request into `main`
          │
          ▼
  GitHub Actions deploys  →  www.lynkrobotics.org  (1–2 min)

Nothing reaches the public site until a maintainer merges to main.

Anyone in the LynkRobotics org can propose a change; only the website maintainers can publish one. See CONTRIBUTING.md if you are proposing, and SETUP.md for the GitHub settings that enforce it.

1. Ask for a change

Point Claude at this repository and describe what you want, e.g.

Add Jane Doe to the mentors page — Mechanical Mentor, engineer at Acme, joined 2026. Her photo is in ~/Downloads/jane.jpg.

Update the home page events: we qualified for States, and the Pembroke event moved to the Jones Center gym.

CLAUDE.md tells Claude where everything lives, what the house style is, and that it owes you a review page with every change.

2. Review

Two ways, both handed to you:

• Screenshots, linked in Claude's reply. Fastest look — every page the change touched, desktop and phone, no waiting.
• A real preview site, linked from a comment on the pull request. Cloudflare builds every branch automatically. Click through it, test the navigation, try it on your phone. Preview builds carry a small Preview badge and are blocked from search engines, so they can never be mistaken for the live site.

3. Publish

A maintainer merges the pull request. The Deploy to GitHub Pages workflow runs automatically; when it goes green the change is live at www.lynkrobotics.org.

If you do not see a Merge button, that is expected — merging is restricted to the website-maintainers team.

To roll back, revert the merge commit on main — the next deploy restores the previous state.

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What lives where

Content is data, not markup. Most changes are a few lines of JSON.

File	Controls
src/_data/site.json	Site name, navigation, contact details, social and donation links
src/_data/mentors.json	The Mentors page
src/_data/leads.json	The two co-lead mentor contact cards
src/_data/sponsors.json	The investor wall and its tiers
src/_data/events.json	Upcoming events on the home page
src/_data/faqs.json	The FAQs page
src/_data/experiences.json	Testimonials on Experiences That Matter
src/_data/seasons.json	Each season page under /seasons/
src/_data/redirects.json	Old URLs that must keep working
src/assets/css/site.css	All styling; design tokens are at the top
src/assets/img/	All imagery

Page templates are the .njk files in src/. The shared header and footer are in src/_includes/.

Running it locally

Only for people editing the code themselves. The workflow above never needs it — see GUIDE.md for the browser-only path.

git clone https://github.com/LynkRobotics/website.git
cd website
npm install
npm start          # http://localhost:8080, live reload

Commands

Command	What it does
npm install	Install dependencies (once, and after package.json changes)
npm start	Local preview on http://localhost:8080 with live reload
npm run build	Build the site into _site/
npm run check	Build, then verify every internal link resolves
npm run clean	Delete _site/
npm run review	Build, screenshot every page, write review.html
npm run build:preview	Build, then mark it as a preview (what Cloudflare runs)

Requires Node.js 20 or newer.

Hosting

• Source of truth: the main branch of this repository.
• Production: .github/workflows/deploy.yml builds and deploys to GitHub Pages on every push to main.
• Previews: Cloudflare Workers builds every other branch with npm run build:preview and comments the preview URL on the pull request. Configured by wrangler.jsonc (an assets-only Worker). It never serves the custom domain — mark-preview.mjs strips CNAME, blocks indexing and stamps a Preview badge on every page.
• Custom domain: src/CNAME contains www.lynkrobotics.org, and that file is what actually sets the custom domain on each deploy — it overrides the Settings → Pages box. The build fails if it goes missing or disagrees.
• www is canonical. lynkrobotics.org 301-redirects to www.lynkrobotics.org. This direction is deliberate and should not be reversed — see "Why www" below.

Old Google Sites paths (/lynk, /lynk/lynk-faqs, /our-people/mentors-lynk, and so on) redirect to their new homes — see src/_data/redirects.json.

Why www

Before the migration, Squarespace served lynkrobotics.org and answered with a permanent redirect to www.lynkrobotics.org. Browsers cache a 301 and stop asking the server, so every browser that visited the old domain still has that redirect saved.

If GitHub sent www back to the apex — the arrangement this site launched with — those browsers would bounce between the two forever and show ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS. Serving the site at www means the stale redirect lands on a real page instead.

Reversing this later would recreate the same loop, this time from GitHub's own cached apex → www redirect. Leave www canonical.

Design

Carried over from the previous Google Sites theme so the site looks familiar:

• Burnt orange #BF5700 — headings, buttons, the footer
• Near-black #1C1C1C — body text and the header bar
• Red Hat Display for everything, Roboto for footer fine print

Fonts are self-hosted, YouTube videos are click-to-load, and the social icons are inline SVG — so a visitor's browser makes no third-party requests just to read a page.

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