dcsketchfest.com

The DC Sketchfest website — a plain static site (HTML + CSS + a little vanilla JS), rebuilt off Webflow. No build step, no framework, no dependencies. Whatever is on the main branch is what's live.

Current state: 2027 is announced, applications are open, tickets are not. The festival runs 31 March – 3 April 2027 at MILKCRATE (Wed/Thu) and Sitar Arts Center (Fri/Sat). Performer applications are open and close 13 December, taking real money through Stripe — see The application system. There is no 2027 lineup yet and no tickets on sale; the Crowdwork calendar is still commented out in index.html. The 2026, 2025 and 2024 lineups stay up as an archive. See Remaining to turn ticketing on.

index.html                  home page
apply/index.html            performer application (talks to the Worker)
volunteer/index.html        volunteer signup
photos/index.html           photo album (generated — see below)
performers-<year>/index.html  lineup pages (generated — see below)
404.html                    not-found page
admin/, donate/,            meta-refresh redirect stubs — no nav, no footer,
  past-performers/          no analytics, nothing shared
assets/css/style.css        all site styles (the only site-wide stylesheet)
assets/css/apply.css        extra styles for the apply + volunteer forms
assets/js/main.js           mobile nav, sliders, scroll reveals, signup form
assets/js/apply.js          the whole application form — and its CONFIG block,
                            which OVERWRITES copy in apply/index.html at runtime
assets/js/volunteer.js      volunteer form (its confirmation screen lives here,
                            not in the HTML)
assets/img/                 all images (nothing loads from Webflow's CDN)
assets/lineups/<year>.json  lineup data, one file per festival
assets/lineups/gallery.json photo manifest for the album and carousel
assets/img/gallery/<year>/  festival photos (800px thumbs + 1800px full)
tools/build-lineup.py       regenerates the lineup pages from that JSON
tools/build-gallery.py      regenerates the album and the homepage carousel
tools/mailing-list.gs       Apps Script for the signup form (deploy separately)
CNAME                       custom domain for GitHub Pages

Working on it locally

python3 -m http.server 4322

Then open http://localhost:4322. Edit a file, refresh. That's the whole loop.

Deploying

Push to main. GitHub Pages redeploys in about a minute. There is no build step and no CI — the committed HTML is what ships.

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How everything is set up

Six moving parts:

1. GitHub hosts the files and serves them over HTTPS.
2. Squarespace answers DNS for the domain.
3. A Google Sheet collects mailing-list signups.
4. Google Analytics counts visits.
5. Crowdwork sells the tickets.
6. A Cloudflare Worker runs the performer application, takes the fee, and can commit back into this repo.

Only the first two are needed to keep the site up. The sixth is the only one that stores anything or costs real money to get wrong — it is a separate repo and is documented at The application system.

1. Hosting — GitHub Pages

Three separate repos, each publishing itself to its own subdomain from main, folder / (root). Each repo's CNAME file is what claims its hostname.

Site	Repo	Serves
Live site	walkergreen/dcsketchfest	dcsketchfest.com
Frozen 2026-brand archive	walkergreen/dcsketchfest-2026	2026.dcsketchfest.com
Rebrand scratchpad	walkergreen/dcsketchfest-staging	staging.dcsketchfest.com

All three have a Let's Encrypt certificate issued and Enforce HTTPS on. The archive and staging sites are noindex with a robots.txt disallow, so they can't compete with the live site in search results.

Settings live at Settings → Pages in each repo. The certificate is issued automatically once DNS resolves; if it never appears (the domain shows a "not secure" warning and HTTPS serves a *.github.io certificate), remove the custom domain, save, then re-add it — that re-triggers provisioning. That is the fix, not a DNS change.

2. DNS — Squarespace Domains

dcsketchfest.com is registered at Squarespace Domains (inherited from Google Domains) and uses Google's nameservers. The zone is not in any GCP project, so records must be edited in the Squarespace panel — there is no API path to it.

Current records:

Type	Name	Value	Why
A	@	185.199.108.153	GitHub Pages
A	@	185.199.109.153	GitHub Pages
A	@	185.199.110.153	GitHub Pages
A	@	185.199.111.153	GitHub Pages
CNAME	www	walkergreen.github.io	redirects to the bare domain
CNAME	2026	walkergreen.github.io	archive site
CNAME	staging	walkergreen.github.io	staging site

Every hostname points at walkergreen.github.io; GitHub decides which repo to serve by matching the requested hostname against each repo's CNAME file. That is why adding a new subdomain is two steps: a CNAME here, and a CNAME file in the repo that should answer it.

Never touch the MX or TXT records. admin@dcsketchfest.com is Google Workspace, and its 5 MX records plus the SPF (v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all) and DMARC entries live in this same zone. Deleting them takes down festival email, which is a far worse outage than the website being down.

Canonical host

The bare domain is canonical — that's what CNAME holds, and www redirects to it. Every absolute URL in the site (canonical tags, og:url, sitemap.xml, robots.txt) points at the bare domain to match. If the custom domain is ever switched to www, those all need updating too, or search engines get contradictory signals.

3. Email marketing — Google Sheet + Apps Script

The signup form on the homepage posts to a Google Apps Script web app, which appends a row to a Google Sheet. No Mailchimp, no third-party account, no monthly fee, and the list stays in the festival's own Drive.

This is already wired up and collecting. The pieces:

Piece	Where
The form	index.html, <form class="signup">, its data-endpoint holds the /exec URL
The script	tools/mailing-list.gs — the copy of record; the running copy is pasted into Apps Script
The Sheet	ID 1Ie3SdfTFCmJSqegK4n_zG5mf26puzopWpDWgP-ISiXQ, tab Signups

Columns are Timestamp, Email, Name, Source, User agent. The script validates the address, skips duplicates case-insensitively, and takes a lock so two simultaneous signups can't overwrite each other. The form carries a honeypot field that bots fill and humans never see; those submissions are accepted in the UI and silently dropped.

To send an actual email blast, export the Sheet (File → Download → CSV) and import it into whatever sends the mail. Nothing in this repo sends email.

If you change the script

Edit tools/mailing-list.gs here and in Apps Script, then Deploy → Manage deployments → edit → New version. Without a new version the live URL keeps running the old code — the single most common way this quietly stops working.

If you ever rebuild it from scratch

1. Create a Sheet in the DCSF Google account.
2. Extensions → Apps Script, paste in tools/mailing-list.gs, and set SHEET_ID to that Sheet's id.
3. Deploy → New deployment → Web app, Execute as: Me, Who has access: Anyone — it must be "Anyone", not "Anyone with a Google account", or the form gets a 401 and every signup fails silently.
4. Authorise it (the "unverified app" warning is expected for your own script: Advanced → Go to … (unsafe)).
5. Put the /exec URL into the form's data-endpoint in index.html.

If data-endpoint is ever emptied, the form degrades gracefully: it still renders and tells people to email admin@dcsketchfest.com.

4. Analytics — Google Analytics 4

Measurement ID G-5WTXCDDHMK (GA4). Reports are in the GA dashboard under the DCSF Google account; nothing is stored in this repo.

The tag is on four pages, not every page:

Page	Tag?
index.html	yes
404.html	yes
apply/index.html	yes
photos/index.html	yes — generated from GA_TAG in build-gallery.py
performers-2024/2025/2026	no — build-lineup.py has no slot for one
volunteer/index.html	no
admin/, donate/, past-performers/	no — redirect stubs, correctly excluded

So the lineup pages and the volunteer page are not being measured. To put a tag on the lineup pages, add it to the PAGE template in build-lineup.py before the <title> and rerun — one edit covers all three.

To change the measurement ID, edit these four and rerun build-gallery.py:

index.html:7-15
404.html:7-15
apply/index.html:7-15
tools/build-gallery.py:38-47     (the GA_TAG constant → regenerates photos/)

assets/js/apply.js also fires gtag('event', …) in four places, but it is guarded by if (window.gtag) and reads no ID, so an ID change needs no edit there. Swapping to a different analytics provider does, making it a fifth place.

To verify it is really reporting (rather than just present in the HTML), open the site with devtools on the Network tab and look for a request to analytics.google.com/g/collect carrying tid=G-5WTXCDDHMK. The tag being in the page source is not proof it fires.

5. Ticketing — Crowdwork

Tickets are not sold by this site. They are sold by Crowdwork, under the theatre handle dcsketchfest. The homepage embeds Crowdwork's calendar, which pulls shows straight from that account:

<script id="fw_script" src="https://crowdwork.com/embed.js?v=6"
        data-theatre="dcsketchfest" data-type="shows" data-view="calendar"
        data-start-date="2027-03-01"></script>

Shows, prices, and on-sale dates are managed in the Crowdwork account, not here. Publish a show there and it appears on the site by itself; nothing in this repo needs a commit for a lineup or on-sale change.

Between festivals that embed is commented out in index.html and a "2027 is coming" panel stands in its place, because an empty calendar looks broken. To turn ticketing back on, follow step 1 of Remaining to turn ticketing on: delete the .coming-soon panel and uncomment the block marked <!-- TICKETS:.

Donations are separate and go through Givebutter (givebutter.com/dcsketchfest2027), linked from the Donate button in the nav.

The application system

The performer application is not part of this repo. apply/index.html and assets/js/apply.js are just the front end; everything behind them is a single Cloudflare Worker in a separate private repo, walkergreen/dcsketchfest-judges-app.

Piece	Where
Worker	dcsketchfest-app.walker-df2.workers.dev (Cloudflare)
Database	Cloudflare D1, dcsketchfest — the source of truth
Payments	Stripe, live mode. Base fee by window ($25 / $30 / $40) + 6% DC tax + card fee. GET /api/apply/fee reports the open window and the exact total.
Email	Resend, from admin@send.dcsketchfest.com (the apex is not verified)
Mirrors	an Airtable base and a Google Sheet, both best-effort copies
Alerts	Slack #applicants, on submission only

The fee is pinned when an application is submitted, not when it is paid, so changing the price does not re-bill anyone who already submitted.

Three places hold the same festival facts

Dates, venues, deadlines and the fee appear on /apply/ three times over, and they must agree:

1. assets/js/apply.js, the CONFIG block (~lines 26–63). This is the source of truth for what a visitor sees — it overwrites the five data-cfg elements, the <title>, the deadlines panel and the availability checkboxes at runtime. Editing apply/index.html alone changes nothing.
2. apply/index.html's meta tags (description, og:title, og:description, og:image). JS never touches these, so they are authoritative — they drive every share card and search result.
3. The Worker's D1 settings. The Worker is what actually enforces the fee and the open/closed phase. The other two only describe it.

Get 1 and 3 out of step and the page advertises one price while the card is charged another.

The homepage fee table in index.html is a fourth copy, and the only one that asks rather than asserts: all three rows ship an "Open now" flag, two of them hidden, and assets/js/main.js un-hides whichever row /apply/fee reports as open. Set the un-hidden row to whatever is open when you commit, because that is what a visitor sees with JS off or the Worker unreachable, and leave the rest to the fetch. The flag used to be hand-kept with a note to move it on November 1 and again on November 30; it ran two days late the first time, and the table went on offering $25 after the $30 window had opened.

The prices in that table stay hand-written on purpose. /apply/fee reports only the window that is open now, so the other two cannot be read from it, and copying the gross-up into the page would make it a second source of truth for a number Stripe charges.

The Worker can commit into this repo

The Worker's admin has a small CMS at /admin/site/publish that rewrites 7 shared values across 11 files here (9 HTML files plus both generators) and commits the result via the GitHub API, which redeploys Pages. The values are things like the contact address, the donate URL, the festival dates and the December 13 close date.

Three things to know before trusting it:

• It cannot reach assets/js/apply.js or assets/js/main.js. Those hold ~14 more copies of the contact address and 5 more of "December 13", so a publish leaves them stale.
• Exact-string replacement can't catch the dates, which are spelled at least six different ways across the repo (March 31 - April 3, 2027, March 31–April 3, 2027, March 31–April 3, 2027, and prose forms).
• A publish that matches nothing still reports success. It records the new value and prints "Published to 0 file(s)" — after which the old string it was searching for is gone from the database and the value can no longer be fixed through the UI. If you see "0 file(s)", treat it as a failure.

Do not hand-edit a CMS-managed value in a generated page. The edit survives the next publish, then the next generator run reverts it, and at that point the value is permanently out of reach of the CMS.

Where a change has to be made

There is no include system, so shared markup is copied. How many places a change touches depends entirely on what kind of change it is — anywhere from one file to six. Check this table before editing anything shared.

Change	Places	Where
Colours, type, spacing, any CSS rule	1	assets/css/style.css — nothing else, no rebuild
Shared JS behaviour (nav drawer, sliders, reveals)	1–2	assets/js/main.js, usually plus style.css (main.js only flips classes; the visible behaviour is the CSS)
Nav link, hamburger, brand	5–6	index.html, apply/index.html, volunteer/index.html, tools/build-lineup.py, tools/build-gallery.py — which has two copies, a NAV const and its own WORDMARK const
Footer	5	the same five. They have already drifted — see below
Analytics tag	4	index.html, 404.html, apply/index.html, tools/build-gallery.py
Lineup page markup	1	tools/build-lineup.py, then rerun
Photo album / Fest Pics carousel	1	tools/build-gallery.py, then rerun
Festival copy on /apply/	3 surfaces	assets/js/apply.js CONFIG, the page's own meta tags, and the Worker's D1 settings — see The application system
A whole new page	7	the page itself, the nav in all 5 above, and sitemap.xml — which is hand-maintained and was missing /apply/ and /volunteer/ for weeks

404.html has no nav and no footer, so it is not one of the five for those. admin/, donate/ and past-performers/ are meta-refresh redirect stubs — no nav, no footer, no analytics, nothing shared.

After editing either generator, rerun it and commit the output:

python3 tools/build-lineup.py && python3 tools/build-gallery.py

Both are idempotent — rerunning with no source change produces byte-identical output, so it is always safe to run them to check.

Which files are generated

Only four files are generated, and they must never be hand-edited:

Generated file	Written by
performers-2024/index.html	tools/build-lineup.py (whole file)
performers-2025/index.html	tools/build-lineup.py (whole file)
performers-2026/index.html	tools/build-lineup.py (whole file)
photos/index.html	tools/build-gallery.py (whole file)

Plus one region of a hand-maintained file: index.html lines between <!-- GALLERY:start --> and <!-- GALLERY:end --> are rewritten by build-gallery.py. The rest of index.html — including its <head> and its analytics tag — is hand-maintained and safe to edit.

Everything else is hand-maintained: index.html, 404.html, apply/index.html, volunteer/index.html, and the three redirect stubs.

Known drift

The copied blocks are no longer identical, because they were edited separately:

• The design credit reads "Design by" in index.html and build-gallery.py, "Designed by" in apply/ and volunteer/, and is missing entirely from build-lineup.py — so the three performers pages have no credit line.
• The footer logo is an inline SVG wordmark in index.html and build-gallery.py, but an <img> of logo-2027-light.png in build-lineup.py, apply/ and volunteer/.
• The three performers pages carry no analytics at all. They are the only real pages with no tag, because build-lineup.py has no slot for one.

Fixing any of these means touching all five places, which is the point of the table above.

Watch the braces. build-lineup.py's page template is a .format() string and build-gallery.py's is an f-string. Any snippet containing a literal { or } — the Google Analytics tag, most JavaScript — will be mangled or throw if pasted inline. Define it as a module-level constant and pass it through a placeholder, the way GA_TAG is wired.

Common edits

Change dates, venue, FAQ answers, testimonials — edit index.html. Each section is marked with a comment banner (<!-- ==== faq ==== --> and so on).

Change a lineup, or add a year — lineups live in assets/lineups/<year>.json, one file per festival (2026, 2025, 2024). Edit one, or drop in a new 2027.json, then:

python3 tools/build-lineup.py

That rewrites every performers-<year>/index.html and rebuilds the year switcher from whatever files exist, so a new year needs no template edits — just add its dates and venue to the YEARS dict at the top of the script. Commit the JSON and the generated HTML together.

Performer images live in assets/img/performers-<year>/; the local field in each entry points at one. city and link are optional — cards drop the line when they're empty.

Change the photos — the album at /photos/ and the homepage Fest Pics carousel are both generated from assets/lineups/gallery.json:

python3 tools/build-gallery.py

Each entry holds a team name, a date, and paths to a thumbnail (800px) and a full-size image (1800px) under assets/img/gallery/<year>/. To swap what the homepage carousel shows, edit the CAROUSEL list at the top of tools/build-gallery.py — it names photos by team, so reprocessing the images can't silently reshuffle the front page. To add a year, add its photos, add an entry to YEARS in the same script, and rerun it. Commit the JSON, the images, and the generated photos/index.html together.

Photos are by Mikail Faalasli; the originals live in the festival's Google Drive (roughly 32 GB of raw JPEGs across 2025 and 2026, plus a 2024 folder) and are deliberately not in this repo — only the resized web copies are.

Change colors or type — the palette is a block of CSS variables at the top of assets/css/style.css:

Variable	Value	Used for
--blue	#2b3fbf	hero, fest pics, Mumbie, lineup page heroes
--pink	#ef4d8e	press + FAQ backgrounds, accents, shadows
--yellow	#ffc933	ticker, testimonials, buttons
--paper	#f6efe1	paper backgrounds, navbar, light text
--ink	#211b3a	text, borders, newsletter + footer

The pre-2027 names (--red, --cream, --teal, --purple, --dark) are aliased onto these inks so older inline styles and generated pages keep working — change the new variables, not the aliases.

Fonts are Anton (display) and Space Grotesk (body), loaded from Google Fonts.

The logo

In the header and footer the logo is not an image — it is live text set in Anton plus an inline SVG of the DC flag (three stars over two bars), assembled by .wordmark / .wordmark-flag in the stylesheet. That keeps it crisp at any size and recolourable per background, which is why the footer version is cream and the header version is ink.

For anywhere outside the website — posters, socials, a partner asking for "your logo" — use the standalone files, which carry the same lockup with the type converted to outlines so they need no font installed:

File	Use on
assets/img/brand/logo-wordmark.svg	light backgrounds (ink type)
assets/img/brand/logo-wordmark-light.svg	dark backgrounds (cream type)

The flag is --pink in both. They were generated from the live CSS lockup and match the desktop header to within half a percent.

Two caveats. The CSS gap between the flag and the words is a fixed 7.2px rather than an em value, so the on-site lockup is slightly tighter at large sizes than at small ones; the SVG files use a fixed 0.30em, matching the desktop header. And the old 2026 PNG logos (logo-wide.png, logo-stacked.png) are still in assets/img/brand/ — nothing on the site renders them, but the Organization JSON-LD block in index.html still points logo at logo-stacked.png, so that needs a new raster export before it is accurate. The 2026-brand site is archived at 2026.dcsketchfest.com (github.com/walkergreen/dcsketchfest-2026).

Remaining to turn ticketing on

Most of the 2027 rollover is already done: the hero, the ticker, the FAQ, the venue cards with both addresses, the Festival JSON-LD with startDate/ endDate and two Place entries, and the nav's Past Lineups pointing at /performers-2026/.

What is left:

1. Ticket calendar — in #about-section in index.html, delete the <div class="coming-soon"> panel and uncomment the block marked <!-- TICKETS: just below it. data-start-date is already 2027-03-01. The calendar pulls shows straight from Crowdwork, so it fills in on its own once shows are published there. Nothing else needs a commit for a ticket change.

   Note that uncommenting this adds a third runtime-overwritten region to the site: the placeholder copy inside that container is not in any HTML file, it is assets/css/style.css (.crowdwork-embed:empty::after).

2. 2027 lineup — add assets/lineups/2027.json, add a "2027" entry to the YEARS dict in tools/build-lineup.py, and run it. The page and the year switcher build themselves. Add /performers-2027/ to sitemap.xml by hand, which no generator does. Then drop the .archive-note paragraph from the template (build-lineup.py:109) once 2027 is current.

3. Analytics on the pages that have none — the three lineup pages and /volunteer/ are unmeasured. See 4. Analytics.

Third-party pieces at a glance

Everything the site talks to, and where it is documented:

Piece	Account	Details
Hosting	GitHub	1. Hosting
DNS	Squarespace Domains	2. DNS
Mailing list	Google Sheet + Apps Script	3. Email marketing
Analytics	Google Analytics 4, G-5WTXCDDHMK	4. Analytics
Tickets	Crowdwork, dcsketchfest	5. Ticketing
Applications	Cloudflare Worker + D1	The application system
Application fees	Stripe, live mode	window-based; GET /api/apply/fee is authoritative; separate repo
Transactional email	Resend	sends from send.dcsketchfest.com, not the apex
Applicant mirrors	Airtable + a Google Sheet	best-effort copies of D1
Applicant alerts	Slack #applicants	on submission only
Donations	Givebutter, dcsketchfest2027	Donate button in the nav of every real page
Fonts	Google Fonts	Anton + Space Grotesk, loaded per page
Email	Google Workspace	admin@dcsketchfest.com — MX records live in the same DNS zone

Legacy note: the pre-rebuild signup list lived in the Webflow dashboard under Forms and was never in this repo. Export it before that account lapses if it hasn't been exported already — those addresses are not in the Sheet.

Notes

• Images were pulled from Webflow's CDN and resized for the web (5 MB total, down from 21 MB of originals). Nothing on the site depends on Webflow staying up.
• The sliders are CSS scroll-snap with arrow buttons — they work with touch, trackpad, and keyboard, and degrade to a plain scroller if JS fails.
• Scroll-reveal animations respect prefers-reduced-motion.