INVITE Research Software Website

This repository is the public landing page at https://inviteai.org. The page shows the research software that the INVITE Institute (the NSF-IES National AI Institute for Innovative Intelligent Technologies for Education) builds and runs. It is one hand-written static page. The page lists these tools:

• The Learner Modeling Dashboard
• The Chat AI Agent
• The Pedagogical AI Agent
• The Pedagogical Agent Toolkit

Each tool has a short description and a live or coming-soon badge. Each tool links to where it runs.

flowchart LR
    visitor["Visitor"] --> site[("inviteai.org<br/>nginx static site")]
    site --> dash["dashboard.inviteai.org<br/>Learner Modeling Dashboard"]
    site --> chat["chat.inviteai.org<br/>Chat AI Agent"]
    site --> agent["agent.inviteai.org<br/>Pedagogical AI Agent"]
    site --> patk["patk.inviteai.org<br/>Pedagogical Agent Toolkit"]

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Quick Start

The site has no build step, and you do not need to install anything. The site is plain static files:

• public/index.html holds the markup.
• public/styles.css holds the styles.
• public/assets/ holds the self-hosted fonts and images.

To preview the site, serve the folder. The stylesheet and relative paths then behave exactly as they do in production.

python3 -m http.server 8080 --directory public   # then open http://localhost:8080

Edit public/index.html or public/styles.css. Then refresh the page to see the change.

What You Get

• The look of the wider INVITE Institute site. The page uses the fonts, colors, lined title bar and footer of its TheGem theme, so the page reads as part of that site.
• A tool list. Each tool has a name, a one-line description, a Live badge, and a button that opens the tool on its own subdomain.
• A screenshot of each running tool, on alternating sides.
• A links band that points to the source code of the tools and to the pages of the Institute.
• The Institute footer, with the NSF and IES funding disclaimer (Grant #2229612), partner logos and social links.

Layout

Path	What
public/	the web root that nginx serves, with everything public
public/index.html	the page markup
public/styles.css	the stylesheet, with the design tokens at the top
public/assets/	self-hosted fonts and images, copied from the invite.illinois.edu theme and uploads
PRODUCT.md	who the page is for, and the product facts that design work must respect
LICENSE	project license

Anything outside public/ (this README, LICENSE, the .git history) is above the web root. Nginx never serves it.

Serving It Remotely

Production uses plain nginx to serve the static folder. There is no application process. The site config sets its root to public/ and serves index.html.

server {
    server_name inviteai.org www.inviteai.org;
    root /var/www/invite-web/public;
    index index.html;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
    # TLS via Certbot, HTTP redirects to HTTPS
}

A push to main deploys the site. The invite-web-deploy webhook resets /var/www/invite-web to origin/main. Nginx uses the new files immediately, so content changes need no reload. Reload nginx only if you change the site config. The origin is behind Cloudflare, so you may need a hard refresh or a cache purge to see a change right away.

Under the Hood

The site is deliberately minimal: static HTML and CSS, with no framework, no bundler and no runtime. The markup is in index.html, and the styles are in styles.css. These plain files are easy to read, edit, review in a diff, and deploy.

Each tool that the page links to has its own repository: lm-dashboard, vex-chat-agent, vex-pedagogical-agent, and the Pedagogical Agent Toolkit. This repository is only the front door.