The Lab: Automating an Archive of Web Simulations

A curated collection of web games, simulations, and apps built by Gamer Geek News. Explore projects built with Three.js, Python, React, and more.

I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m a “lazy” poster. Looking back over the ~15 years I’ve been sharing projects on this domain, the frequent long gaps in my post history tell a clear story. I love building things, but the administrative overhead of documenting them—writing the post, formatting the links, and manually capturing screenshots—often feels like a hurdle.

Consequently, many of my favorite experiments end up “hidden” in the depths of a GitHub repo or living un-indexed on a random subdomain.

The Solution: A JSON-Driven Showcase

To resolve this, I finally built The Lab Showcase. I wanted a system that was low-friction: no database, no heavy CMS, just a simple projects.json file. By defining my projects in a structured format, I can update the entire page just by adding a few lines of text.

Automating the Visuals with Selenium

The biggest bottleneck in any portfolio is the screenshots. Manually opening 50+ URLs, waiting for the canvas to render, and cropping images was exactly the kind of task that would stop me from ever updating the page. Instead, I wrote a Python Selenium script to do the heavy lifting.

The script iterates through my JSON file, launches a headless browser, and takes the captures for me. To ensure I wasn’t just getting “empty” loading screens for heavy Three.js projects, I built in a staggered wait time:

# Selenium Automation Snippet
def capture_screenshot(url, save_path):
    options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
    options.add_argument("--headless=new")
    driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
    
    driver.get(url)
    # Give Three.js and textures time to initialize
    time.sleep(5) 
    
    driver.save_screenshot(save_path)
    driver.quit()

To finish it off, I used the Pillow (PIL) library to automatically crop the images to a 16:9 aspect ratio and resize them to 800x450px. This ensures the showcase grid looks professional and aligned without me ever having to touch an image editor.

If you’re a developer looking to build your own “lazy” portfolio, I highly recommend the JSON + Automation route. It turns a chore back into a hobby.