overview architecture

Architecture

This site is a static site built by Jekyll. The architecture is straightforward: content files (Markdown, YAML, BibTeX) are processed through Liquid templates and SCSS stylesheets to produce a set of HTML pages served by GitHub Pages.

Build pipeline

graph TD
    A[Content files] --> B[Jekyll build]
    B --> C[Liquid templates]
    C --> D[HTML output]
    E[SCSS files] --> F[Sass compiler]
    F --> G[CSS output]
    D --> H[PurgeCSS]
    G --> H
    H --> I[Minifier]
    I --> J[_site/ output]
    J --> K[GitHub Pages / gh-pages branch]

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Source files

Content lives in Jekyll collections:

• _pages/ — top-level pages (about, blog index, CV, publications, projects, etc.)
• _posts/ — blog posts (naming convention: YYYY-MM-DD-title.md)
• _projects/ — project showcase entries
• _news/ — announcements displayed on the about page
• _books/ — book reviews
• _teachings/ — course listings
• _bibliography/papers.bib — BibTeX publications database

Templates and layouts

_layouts/ contains the page skeleton for each content type. _includes/ holds reusable components (header, footer, navigation, analytics scripts, etc.). Layouts use Liquid templating to inject content and configuration from _config.yml.

Key layouts:

Layout	Purpose
about.liquid	Profile page with avatar, bio, news, and selected papers
post.liquid	Blog post with metadata, TOC, and related posts
bib.liquid	Publication entry with badges (Altmetric, Dimensions, Google Scholar)
cv.liquid	Full CV page rendered from _data/cv.yml
distill.liquid	Distill-style interactive articles
page.liquid	Generic content page

Styling

SCSS files in _sass/ compile to CSS. The theme system (_sass/_themes.scss) supports light and dark modes. Key files:

File	Purpose
_sass/_base.scss	Base styles, layout grid, responsive breakpoints
_sass/_themes.scss	Light/dark color variable definitions
_sass/_navbar.scss	Navigation bar styles
_sass/_publications.scss	Publication list styling
_sass/_cv.scss	CV page layout
_sass/_utilities.scss	Utility classes

Plugins

The Gemfile declares ~20 Jekyll plugins. Notable ones:

• jekyll-scholar — BibTeX bibliography processing and citation rendering
• jekyll-paginate-v2 — Blog pagination
• jekyll-archives-v2 — Tag/category/year archive pages
• jekyll-minifier — HTML/CSS minification
• jekyll-imagemagick — Responsive image generation (WebP)
• jekyll-toc — Table of contents generation
• jemoji — GitHub emoji support

Custom plugins in _plugins/ extend Jekyll with citation fetching (Google Scholar, InspireHEP), external post importing, and accent removal.

Deployment

GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/deploy.yml) builds the site on push to main:

1. Checkout code
2. Set up Ruby 3.3.5, Python 3.13, Node.js
3. Install ImageMagick, nbconvert
4. bundle exec jekyll build with JEKYLL_ENV=production
5. Run PurgeCSS to strip unused CSS
6. Commit built output to gh-pages branch

The gh-pages branch is served by GitHub Pages.

Data flow

graph LR
    A[_config.yml] --> B[Jekyll]
    C[_data/*.yml] --> B
    D[_bibliography/*.bib] --> B
    E[_pages/*.md] --> B
    F[_posts/*.md] --> B
    G[_layouts/*.liquid] --> B
    H[_includes/*.liquid] --> B
    I[_sass/*.scss] --> B
    B --> J[_site/]
    J --> K[GitHub Pages]

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Key source files

File	Purpose
_config.yml	Central configuration: site metadata, feature flags, plugin settings, library versions
Gemfile	Ruby dependency declarations for Jekyll and all plugins
Dockerfile	Docker image definition for local development
docker-compose.yml	Docker Compose config mapping port 8080 and source volume
bin/entry_point.sh	Docker entry point: starts Jekyll with livereload, watches _config.yml for changes
purgecss.config.js	PurgeCSS configuration for production CSS optimization
.github/workflows/deploy.yml	Main CI/CD deployment workflow
.github/workflows/prettier.yml	Code formatting enforcement workflow