zenobi-us Cyberwise: sitebuilder
Verified: 2026-08-21 Re-check after a patch: nothing here depends on a game patch. Re-check when the character document layout changes.
Somebody has written their V. It is sitting in a .md file that nobody will ever
read, because "read this Markdown file" is a thing you can only ask of other
developers.
tools\New-CharacterSite.ps1 -From <characters folder> -Out <site folder> -Open
-From defaults to characters beside you, because pointing it at your own
folder of documents is the normal way to use this. -Out does not: it
defaults to ...\Cyberpunk 2077\Cyberwise\reports\site, with the install's
other records. It used to default to the current directory, which for an agent
is usually a clone - so the site got written into the source tree.
That is the whole interface. The output folder is the site: copy it to a web
host, a USB stick or a Discord upload, or double-click index.html.
The architecture is CSS Zen Garden
Every character page emits the same semantic markup - eyebrow, h1, subhead,
content, meta, footer - and a per-character stylesheet owns everything about how
it looks. Not a palette swap. A different world:
| character | what the page is |
|---|---|
| an Arasaka personnel file | gold leaf on a kill order: classification band, watermark, misregistered headline, redactions as objects lying on the page |
| a monologue told to a dying man | wet, green, breathing; the room a fraction off true; her asides cut across the column |
| a nomad legend at a fire | dust, rust and firelight, torn edges, type like a hand-painted sign on a truck |
| an AI reading somebody's file aloud | a terminal that discusses a person exactly as it would discuss disk usage |
**A theme is one CSS file in themes\.** Copy default.css, rename it after the
character, done - the builder picks up themes\<character>.css with no
configuration, or reads a theme.txt in the character's folder. That is why this
tool does not generate CSS: generated CSS is CSS nobody can edit.
tests\Test-Tools.ps1 enforces the invariant by comparing the two pages' tag and
class skeletons. If the builder ever starts emitting different structure per
character, a theme can no longer be written blind, and the whole idea collapses.
What it must never do: flatten the documents
Character documents are not copies of one form. The format is the characterisation - which is also why the tool renders each document as written instead of extracting Name / Lifepath / Backstory into fields. A template would make all four the same shape, the one outcome that makes the site worse than the files it was built from.
Three places this shows up, all tested:
- A field block keeps its lines. Markdown says consecutive lines are one
paragraph, which is right for wrapped prose and catastrophic for
SUBJECT:/CODENAME:/AKAS:, where each line is a field. - A nested list nests. Indentation in a dossier is structure.
- Document furniture is tagged, not styled. The renderer marks a
classification stamp
.cls, a redaction.redact, a single all-capitals line.allcaps, a short beat.brief- and each theme decides what those mean. In the transcript,.allcapsis the machine interrupting; in the dossier it is a reference number.
Why there is no dependency
The audience is somebody with no technical patience, and every dependency is a place they stop: a runtime to install, a package manager to learn, an account to make. So it is PowerShell, which is already on the machine, and the output is plain HTML, a few stylesheets and one small script.
The site must work from file://. Nothing fetches - the browser blocks it
from a filesystem origin - so every page is complete when written. That is also
what makes it private by default: no tracking, no fonts phoning home, no CDN.
Every texture is CSS or an inline SVG data URI; there is not one image file in
the theme layer.
The layout it reads
characters\valkyrie\Profile - Valkyrie.md the document (required)
characters\valkyrie\Meta - Valkyrie.md optional second section
characters\valkyrie\media\*.jpg|png|webp optional images
characters\valkyrie\theme.txt optional theme name
Anything else is ignored, so presets, backups and working notes can live beside
the document without being published. A folder whose name starts with _ is a
draft and is skipped unless -IncludeDrafts is passed. Profile*.md is the
convention, but a folder holding exactly one Markdown file works without it - a
convention nobody was told about is a trap.
Media is optional, and its absence must not look broken
The prototype was built for somebody with no images at all, which is the
normal starting state. The directory is typographic rather than a card grid, so
nothing is waiting for a photograph that does not exist; when images arrive, drop
them in media\ and rebuild for a gallery and lightbox on the character's page.
Tools
| tool | does |
|---|---|
tools/New-CharacterSite.ps1 |
the whole site: directory, one page per character, themes, JS |
tools/ConvertFrom-Markdown.ps1 |
the Markdown subset these documents use, plus the document markers (dot-sourced) |
themes/*.css |
one file per character, plus _base.css (structure only), index.css and default.css |
Not built yet
- Other sections - a mod list from
cyberwise-reports, a hotkey sheet fromcyberwise-hotkeys. Both already render HTML; the work is a shared shell. cyberwise-mediadoes not exist, so galleries are a plain grid.- A theme picker in the output. Zen Garden's own trick - the same document under every stylesheet - would be a few lines, and would make the point better than any explanation.