CLAUDE.md - Project Guide

Overview

Personal academic website for Luis Mota Freitas (Economics PhD, Northwestern University). Built with Jekyll using the Academic Pages template (Minimal Mistakes derivative). Hosted on GitHub Pages at luismotafreitas.com.

Repository: luismotafreitas/luismotafreitas.github.io

See README.md for the full directory structure, layout hierarchy, styling system, and common tasks reference.

Development

# Local development (Ruby/Bundler)
bundle install
jekyll serve -l -H localhost    # serves on localhost:4000

# Docker alternative
docker-compose up

# JavaScript build
npm run build:js                # minifies JS via uglify-js

Note: _config.yml changes require restarting jekyll serve.

Key Files

Purpose	File(s)
Site config	`_config.yml`
Homepage	`_pages/about.md`
Research page	`_pages/research.html`
Navigation	`_data/navigation.yml`
Theme colors	`_sass/theme/_default.scss` (light), `_sass/theme/_dark.scss` (dark)
JS entry	`assets/js/_main.js`
Sass entry	`assets/css/main.scss`

Common Tasks

Add a research paper: Edit _pages/research.html directly. Follow the existing HTML pattern for paper entries (title, authors, journal, abstract toggle, PDF/link buttons). Add PDF to files/.

Add a navigation link: Add entries in _data/navigation.yml.

Edit author profile: Modify the author: section in _config.yml.

Modify styles: Edit the relevant .scss file in _sass/layout/. For theme colors, edit _sass/theme/_default.scss (light) or _sass/theme/_dark.scss (dark).

Add a new page: Create a .md or .html file in _pages/ with appropriate front matter (permalink, layout, title, author_profile: true).

Edit JavaScript: After editing assets/js/_main.js, run npm run build:js to regenerate the minified bundle (assets/js/main.min.js). The site serves the minified file.

CI/CD

GitHub Pages: Deploys automatically from the repository

Maintenance

When the site structure changes (new pages, directories, layouts, or config keys), update README.md accordingly. It serves as the detailed reference for the project’s directory structure, layout hierarchy, styling system, and configuration — both for human contributors and AI agents.