A new site, built for the agent era

The site you’re reading has been running on the same Jekyll template since 2012. It served me well through a PhD, a few jobs, and a couple of career shifts, but it was starting to feel like showing up to a conference in a t-shirt I bought in grad school — still wearable, but maybe communicating more than I intended.

So I rebuilt it. This is both a launch post and a note to future me.

The stack

• Astro 5 — static-first, islands architecture, content collections with typed frontmatter. It builds down to flat HTML that GitHub Pages can serve directly.
• Tailwind CSS v4 — the new @theme block and OKLCH colour system make it surprisingly pleasant to set up a design system in one file.
• MDX for long-form content like the Langflow case study and these posts.
• Dynamic OG images generated at build time with Satori.
• View Transitions API for smooth page-to-page navigation — small polish that matters.
• Inter, Newsreader, and JetBrains Mono for the type, with small-caps and OpenType ligatures turned on.

Total build output: ~400 KB of JS, most of which is icon sprites. Lighthouse scores at 100 across the board for the static pages.

Why stay on GitHub Pages

I considered moving to Vercel or Cloudflare Pages. Both are excellent. But for a portfolio site with no server-side features, GitHub Pages is still the right call in 2026:

• Zero ops, zero cost.
• Deploys straight from a push to main.
• Custom domain + free TLS.
• The repo is the backup.

Astro builds static HTML, so nothing about this choice locks me into Pages. If I ever need server-rendered routes I can flip the adapter and move hosts without rewriting a single page.

Design principles, such as they are

1. Type first. Headlines in Newsreader because serifs still communicate thoughtfulness; body in Inter; mono in JetBrains. Small-caps on for proper numerals in tabular data. Nothing radical.
2. One accent colour. A single teal used sparingly — the status dot in the header, the left border of a blockquote, the eyebrow labels at the top of a section. The rest is grayscale.
3. Dark mode by default. Technical audience, dim rooms, laptops at night. Toggleable.
4. No animations that aren’t doing work. View transitions and hover nudges earn their keep; parallax and floating particles do not.
5. Content collections over page components. Every project, publication, and post is a Markdown file with typed frontmatter, so adding new ones is a matter of writing content — not editing JSX.

What’s on the site

• Projects — Langflow featured, plus bullet-matching, discreteRV, intRo, Daisi, Docling, and Omni Analytics.
• Publications — the full academic paper trail, now with sorghum-head counting for extra colour.
• CV — rendered from a single cv.md at the root of the repo. The PDF and the web version both come from the same source.
• /llms.txt — a 2026 affectation: a structured index for agents that want machine-readable context about me.

What I cut

The Jekyll site had a Classes page that hadn’t been updated since 2015, a Teaching page ditto, and a Contact page whose form had never worked. None of those made it. If I go back to teaching I’ll put those back; until then, grep git log for the archaeology.

Housekeeping

• The old master branch is now main, and the GitHub default branch is updated.
• The old Rmd-authored PDF CV pipeline is gone — Markdown-first, PDF exported from that source.
• The entire legacy tree is preserved under src-legacy/ in the repo history so nothing is lost.

If you spot a broken link or a stale fact, please email ericrhare@gmail.com and I’ll fix it. The site’s source is open on GitHub.

— Eric