CLAUDE.md

This file provides guidance to Claude Code (claude.ai/code) when working with code in this repository.

What this is

Benjamin D. Killeen’s personal academic website (served at benjamindkilleen.com, hosted on GitHub Pages). It is a Jekyll site built on the academicpages template, itself a detached fork of the Minimal Mistakes theme. Most files under _includes/, _layouts/, _sass/, and assets/ are inherited theme code — content lives in the collections and _pages/.

Commands

Local development (Ruby/Bundler + Jekyll):

bundle install                    # install gems (delete Gemfile.lock first if it errors)
bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload   # serve at localhost:4000 with live reload
bundle exec jekyll serve          # serve without live reload

_config.dev.yml is a local override (disables analytics, sets url to localhost). Apply it with:

bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload --config _config.yml,_config.dev.yml

Note: _config.yml is not reloaded on change — restart the server after editing it.

JavaScript build (only when editing assets/js/):

npm run build:js                  # uglify + concat plugins into assets/js/main.min.js
npm run watch:js                  # rebuild main.min.js on JS change

Deployment

Push to main → GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/deploy.yaml, helaili/jekyll-action) builds and publishes to GitHub Pages. There is no separate deploy step: committing to main publishes the live site. CNAME maps the custom domain.

`files/cv_killeen.pdf` is auto-generated — do not hand-edit

The CV PDF is built and pushed automatically by a workflow in the separate benjamindkilleen/cv repo (.github/workflows/publish-cv.yml): a push there compiles cv_killeen.tex with latexmk, then commits the resulting files/cv_killeen.pdf into this repo (via a write deploy key), which in turn triggers the Pages deploy above. To update the CV, edit the LaTeX in the cv repo and push — never edit the PDF here, it will be overwritten. Commits authored by cv-publish-bot are these auto-updates.

Content architecture

Site config is _config.yml (site-wide settings, plus the collections, defaults, and author block). Content is Markdown with YAML front matter, organized as Jekyll collections declared in _config.yml:

_posts/ — blog posts (YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md); _drafts/ for unpublished
_teaching/ — teaching collection entries
_publications/, _talks/, _portfolio/ — declared collections (create the dir to add entries; not all exist yet)
_pages/ — standalone pages (about, cv, publications, talks, teaching, contact, etc.); each routes via its permalink front-matter key

Site-wide data lives in _data/: navigation.yml (top nav), authors.yml (author-profile sidebar), ui-text.yml (theme strings). Uploaded PDFs/assets go in files/ and are served at /files/...; images in images/.

Generators (optional tooling)

markdown_generator/ converts TSV (publications.tsv, talks.tsv) into per-item Markdown for the publications/talks collections. Each has a .py script and an equivalent documented .ipynb.

talkmap.py / talkmap.ipynb scrape the location: field from talk .md files, geocode them (geopy/Nominatim, requires getorg), and emit a Leaflet cluster map into talkmap/. Run from the talks collection directory. Enable the link with talkmap_link: true in _config.yml.

Editing the theme vs. patching upstream

Because this is a detached fork of academicpages/Minimal Mistakes, theme changes (_includes/, _layouts/, _sass/) diverge from upstream — pulling upstream will conflict. Prefer changing content/config over theme internals unless a layout change is genuinely required.

Benjamin D. Killeen