INVITE Research Software Website

The public landing page at https://inviteai.org for the research software built and run by the INVITE Institute (the NSF-IES National AI Institute for Innovative Intelligent Technologies for Education). It is a single, hand-written static page that indexes each tool - the Learner Modeling Dashboard, the Pedagogical AI Agent, and the PA Toolkit - with a short description and a live or coming-soon badge, and links out to where each one runs.

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

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Quick Start

There is no build step and nothing to install. The site is plain static files, the markup in public/index.html and the styles in public/styles.css, with fonts and images self-hosted under public/assets/. To preview it, serve the folder so the stylesheet and relative paths 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, refresh, and you see the change.

What You Get

• The look of the wider INVITE Institute site (its TheGem theme's fonts, colors, lined title bar, and footer), so this page reads as part of it.
• A tool list where each tool carries a name, a one-line description, a Live badge, and a button that opens it on its own subdomain.
• The Pedagogical AI Agent with its Chat tool grouped underneath it.
• Each tool paired with a screenshot of it running, alternating sides.
• A links band pointing to the tools' source code and the Institute's own pages.
• The Institute footer: NSF and IES funding disclaimer (Grant #2229612), partner logos, and social links.

Layout

Path	What
public/	the web root nginx serves, where everything public-facing lives
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 design work must respect
LICENSE	project license

Anything outside public/ (this README, LICENSE, the .git history) sits above the web root and is never served.

Serving It Remotely

Production is plain nginx serving the static folder, with no application process. The site config points its root at 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
}

Deploying is a git pull in /var/www/invite-web. Nginx picks up the new files immediately, so no reload is needed for content changes, and you only reload nginx if you touch the site config itself. The origin sits behind Cloudflare, so a hard refresh or a cache purge may be needed to see a change right away.

Under the Hood

Deliberately minimal, static HTML and CSS, no framework, no bundler, no runtime. The markup lives in index.html and the styles in styles.css, and keeping them as plain files makes it trivial to read, edit, review in a diff, and deploy. The tools it links to each live in their own repository, lm-dashboard, vex-agent-integration, and the PA Toolkit. This repo is only the front door.