Stefan Girstmair

Stefan Girstmair

Economist

CLAUDE.md

CLAUDE.md

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

Overview

This is Stefan Girstmair’s personal academic website, built with Jekyll using the academicpages template (a fork of Minimal Mistakes). It is deployed via GitHub Pages at https://stefangirstmair.github.io/.

Local Development

# Install dependencies (one-time)
sudo apt install ruby-dev ruby-bundler nodejs
bundle install

# Serve locally with live reload (recommended)
bundle exec jekyll liveserve

# Serve with dev config (disables analytics, uses localhost URL)
bundle exec jekyll serve --config _config.yml,_config.dev.yml

The site is available at http://localhost:4000. Jekyll watches for file changes and rebuilds automatically.

If you get bundle errors, delete Gemfile.lock and re-run bundle install.

Site Architecture

Content lives in Jekyll collections and pages — all written in Markdown with YAML front matter.

Key collections (each item = one .md file):

  • _publications/ — research papers; uses custom front matter (paperurl, subtitle)
  • _talks/ — conference talks and presentations
  • _teaching/ — teaching positions
  • _pages/ — standalone pages served at fixed permalinks

Primary content files for this site:

  • _pages/about.md — homepage (permalink: /)
  • _pages/research.md — research page with full paper descriptions (this is the main research page, not _publications/)
  • _pages/cv.md — CV page
  • _pages/teachingmd.md — teaching page
  • _data/navigation.yml — top navigation bar links
  • _config.yml — site-wide settings (author info, social links, analytics)
  • files/ — PDFs and downloadable files (e.g., CV_Girstmair.pdf)

Layouts (in _layouts/):

  • talk.html — used by all _talks/ entries
  • single.html — used by pages, posts, publications, teaching
  • default.html — base layout

Navigation is controlled entirely by _data/navigation.yml. Items can be commented out to hide them from the menu.

Content Conventions

Publications front matter:

---
title: "Paper Title"
subtitle: "Job Market Paper"   # optional label
collection: publications
excerpt: 'Abstract text here'
paperurl: 'http://stefangirstmair.github.io/files/paper.pdf'
---

Talks front matter:

---
title: "Talk Title"
collection: talks
type: "Conference talk"
permalink: /talks/YYYY-MM-DD-slug
venue: "Conference Name"
date: YYYY-MM-DD
location: "City, Country"
---

The _pages/research.md file is the primary research page shown in navigation — it contains full paper descriptions written manually. The _publications/ collection is a secondary mechanism (not currently linked in nav).

Markdown Generator

markdown_generator/ contains Python scripts and Jupyter notebooks to batch-generate talk/publication markdown files from TSV spreadsheets (talks.tsv, publications.tsv). Use these if adding many entries at once.

Deployment

Pushing to the master branch automatically triggers GitHub Pages to rebuild and deploy the site. There is no CI/CD pipeline to configure.