NOTE: this repo and the documentation below was entirely generated with a coding assistant as an experiment to test abilities to staticise a site.

site2static

Python tool that scrapes the Making History: Shakespeare and the Royal Family exhibition at https://sharc.kcl.ac.uk/exhibition/ into a portable, self-contained static HTML mirror that works fully offline (open via file:// or a local python -m http.server).

Usage

pip install -r requirements.txt
python main.py [url] [output_dir]

With no arguments it mirrors the SHARC exhibition into ./html/.

What it preserves offline

• All pages, navigation, hero carousel, breadcrumbs, next/related-object links.
• "Find out more ..." contextual-object modals (pure in-page HTML).
• Self-hosted fonts (Open Sans / Raleway) and Font Awesome 5 icons.
• Every IIIF image that the source server will serve (stored locally).
• The IIIF "Guided tour" deep-zoom viewer, rebuilt on a vendored OpenSeadragon 2.4.2 with a local high-resolution derivative (pan, zoom, fullscreen) instead of the live tile stream.
• Third-party embeds (Sketchfab 3D models, YouTube videos) are kept so they work online, with an explanatory placeholder shown offline.

What needs the network (and why)

• 3D models (Sketchfab) and videos (YouTube) are hosted by third parties; the embed is retained and a captioned placeholder notes the limitation. See html/OFFLINE_NOTES.md after a run.
• IIIF images on rct.resourcespace.com are region-locked in some networks; any that fail are listed in html/manifest.json and left as the original URL so they still load when online. Re-run from an unrestricted network to fill them in.

Publishing to GitHub Pages

The html/ folder is committed to the repo (it is the published artifact). A workflow at .github/workflows/pages.yml publishes it to GitHub Pages whenever html/** changes on main:

• In the repo Settings → Pages → Build and deployment → Source, select GitHub Actions.
• Push (or merge) a change under html/ to main. The workflow uploads the html/ folder as a Pages artifact and deploys it. You can also run it manually via the Actions tab (workflow_dispatch).

To refresh the published mirror, regenerate it locally and commit the updated html/ folder:

pip install -r requirements.txt
python main.py
git add html
git commit -m "docs: refresh html mirror"
git push

License

MIT