Site setup notes

Site setup notes

Jekyll site (academicpages theme, a fork of Minimal Mistakes) for Nicholas Swanson, hosted on GitHub Pages at nicholasgswanson.github.io.

Local preview

Run ./preview.sh from the repo root, then open http://localhost:4000. It watches files and rebuilds on save — just refresh the browser.

Two things this script handles that aren’t obvious:

  • Locale. This machine’s shell has no LANG/LC_ALL set, so Ruby defaults to US-ASCII and the Sass compiler crashes on any non-ASCII character (e.g. an em dash). The script sets LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8.
  • Config. It passes --config _config.yml,_config.dev.yml so generated links point at localhost:4000 instead of the production URL. Without this, `` resolves to https://nicholasgswanson.github.io/..., so the page tries to load CSS/assets from the live site over the network instead of from the local build.

If you ever build/serve manually instead of via the script, include both of those or pages will look unstyled or load stale production CSS.

iCloud Drive warning

This repo lives under ~/Documents/GitHub/..., which is synced by iCloud Drive (Desktop & Documents sync). iCloud syncs .git internals (pack files, refs, locks) in the background, and it can collide with git/GitHub Desktop mid-operation — this is what causes the occasional “a lock file already exists in the repository” error in GitHub Desktop. It’s usually transient (no actual .git/index.lock left behind); closing the dialog and retrying after a few seconds resolves it. If it keeps recurring, the real fix is moving the repo to a non-iCloud-synced path (e.g. ~/Developer/).

Design decisions (2026-06-26 redesign)

  • Dropped the theme’s persistent sidebar/author-profile/”Follow” button site-wide (removed the `

Nicholas Swanson

Nicholas Swanson

Assistant Professor of Economics at Cornell University

</div> ` call from _layouts/single.html, archive.html, talk.html). Pages are now a single centered column ($content-width: 740px in _sass/_variables.scss).

  • Homepage (_pages/about.md) has a custom hero intro (photo + name + title + Email/CV/Research links) instead of the sidebar widget. Styles in _sass/_custom.scss under .home-intro.
  • Accent color is blue ($accent-color in _sass/_variables.scss, currently #2B6CB0) — used for links, hover states, and list numbering. (Was briefly Cornell red; changed back to a normal blue per feedback — don’t reintroduce red.)
  • Fixed a real pre-existing bug in _sass/_reset.scss: the global a { color: $link-color } rule was losing to the browser’s built-in a:link/a:visited styles on specificity, so the theme’s link color was never actually showing. Now targets a:link, a:visited explicitly.
  • Research/Teaching pages use a .pub-list numbered-list pattern (_sass/_custom.scss): an <ol class="pub-list" markdown="1"> of <li markdown="1"> items, each with {: .pub-title} / {: .pub-authors} / {: .pub-venue} IAL classes on the markdown paragraphs. Numbering is CSS counter-based (auto-renumbers if you add/remove/reorder entries).
    • kramdown gotcha: markdown="1" does not cascade to children — it has to be set on every nested HTML block you want parsed as markdown (hence it’s on both the <ol> and each <li>).
  • Abstracts are hidden by default behind a “Abstract” toggle button (.pub-abstract-toggle / .pub-abstract.is-open), driven by assets/js/pub-toggle.js (vanilla JS, no jQuery, click-delegated). Loaded via _includes/scripts.html.
  • Teaching page is _pages/teaching.md — not the old _teaching collection (those placeholder files were deleted). To add a course, copy one of the existing <li> blocks in that file directly; don’t recreate the collection.
  • CV: nav and homepage both link directly to the PDF (/files/Swanson_cv_v13.pdf), not to an in-page viewer — an <iframe> embed was tried and rejected (shows the browser’s native PDF toolbar, looks bad). _pages/cv.md still exists at /cv/ as a fallback (simple link) for anyone who lands there directly, but nothing routes there now.
  • Swanson_cv_v13.pdf (Mar 2025) is the current CV. There are several stale CV PDFs in /files/ (1_swanson_cv.pdf, Swanson_cv_v8.pdf, Swanson_cv_Nov20.pdf, Swanson_cv_v13 copy.pdf) — don’t link to those, they’re outdated.