Escaping Things

The Escaping Things escape room team site, published at escape.thingelstad.com.

This is an Eleventy-powered static site built from a normalized Airtable dataset. The current site includes:

• 100 public rooms
• 94 played rooms and 6 scheduled rooms
• 9 countries
• typed entities for companies, locations, themes, players, awards, trips, lists, and experiences
• standalone featured pages for selected players, awards, and trips
• standalone list pages plus room/list/player/trip cross-linking

Stack

• Eleventy (11ty) v3
• Nunjucks templates
• Plain CSS and vanilla JavaScript
• Leaflet for maps
• Chart.js for stats
• Pagefind for site-wide search
• Tinylytics for analytics
• GitHub Pages via GitHub Actions

No framework, no client-side data fetching, no runtime backend.

Data Model

Raw Airtable snapshots live in src/_data/airtable/ and are synced with:

npm run sync

The sync script pulls these Airtable tables:

• Companies
• Locations
• Themes
• Players
• Awards
• Trips
• Lists
• List Items
• Rooms
• Experiences

Those raw snapshots are normalized in src/_data/catalog.js through lib/catalog.js. The catalog is the canonical site data layer and exposes:

• rooms
• companies
• locations
• themes
• players
• awards
• trips
• lists
• experiences
• featured.players
• featured.awards
• featured.trips
• lookup indexes by Airtable ID and slug

Each room carries resolved relations and derived fields such as:

• stable Room ID
• canonical room slug and permalink
• officialUrl resolved by Room URL -> Location URL -> Company URL
• typed players, awards, trips, lists, and themes
• nested company and location
• ratingSummary from Experiences

Public Pages

• / home page
• /list/ filterable room browser
• /map/ filterable map
• /stats/ stats and charts
• /featured/ featured hub
• /trips/ featured trip index
• /players/ team roster and featured player index
• /room/<room-slug>/
• /player/<slug>/ for featured players
• /award/<slug>/ for featured awards
• /trip/<slug>/ for featured trips
• /lists/ all public lists
• /list/<slug>/ for standalone lists

Development

Install dependencies:

npm install

Run the local dev server:

npm start

Build the site:

npm run build

Refresh Airtable snapshots:

npm run sync

Run tests:

npm test

Tests

The test suite covers:

• catalog normalization and data contracts
• fallback officialUrl behavior
• hidden-room exclusion
• list and list-item relationship handling
• browser-level filter smoke tests using jsdom

Airtable Sync

The sync script reads these environment variables:

• AIRTABLE_PAT
• AIRTABLE_BASE_ID It also reads .env in the project root if present.

Search

The site has two search mechanisms:

• Catalog filter on /list/ and /map/ — structured dropdowns and text search over an embedded JSON index for instant client-side filtering
• Site-wide search via Pagefind — full-text search across all rendered pages, accessible from the search icon in the nav bar. Pagefind indexes the built site as a post-build step and requires a full npm run build to generate the index.

Deployment

Pushes to main trigger the GitHub Pages workflow in .github/workflows/deploy.yml.

License

Code is licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0. Site content and underlying data are personal to the Escaping Things team.