CLAUDE.md

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

What this is

Michael Wallbaum’s personal site, mwallba.io: plain Jekyll with no theme, built natively by GitHub Pages from main (there’s no Actions workflow, so a push deploys it). The repo is effizient-io/mwallba.io and it’s private. README.md holds the full background: DNS, the cutover, and the history of old URLs. Read it before changing URLs or hosting.

This is a verification page, not a marketing page. People arrive already knowing the name, from a search, an LLM answer, or a link somewhere else. Nothing on the page asks for anything: no contact form, no address, no availability line. Keep it that way. The prose uses plain hyphens ( - ), not em dashes.

Commands

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve   # http://127.0.0.1:4000
bundle exec jekyll build   # output in _site/

The github-pages gem pins the Jekyll 3.x and plugin versions that GitHub actually runs. Don’t add plugins outside the Pages whitelist, because they won’t run in production. There are no tests or linters.

How the pieces connect

• Identity is driven by config. profiles and person in _config.yml feed three outputs at once: the Elsewhere list in index.html, the rel="me" links, and the sameAs array in the Person JSON-LD (_includes/person-schema.html, included from _layouts/default.html). Only identity: true profiles go into sameAs, because it means “this is the same person”. A URL of "#" is skipped.
• llms.txt is a hand-written plain-text copy of the homepage. It restates the Now/Before prose from index.html, so when the homepage bio changes, update llms.txt to match. robots.txt allows every crawler on purpose.
• Posts fall into two lists, split by archived: true.
  • /archive/ (archive.html) shows only archived: true posts. These are the 2020 pieces, republished because people still link to them. They carry a note: front-matter field that _layouts/post.html renders as an aside about what has changed since.
  • /writing/ (writing.html) shows every other post. The homepage footer link to Writing appears only once a non-archived post exists.
  • Never set archived: true on new writing.
• New post: add _posts/YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md with layout: post, title, excerpt (a single sentence, shown on the listings and in the feed) and date. The URL, listing, sitemap and feed all follow from that.
• CSS: assets/style.css is global. assets/post.css loads only for layout: post or for pages that set extra_css: true.
• Social card: index.html sets image: in its own front matter, because jekyll-seo-tag reads it there and not from site config.
• Dates: last_modified_at in front matter feeds the sitemap lastmod and dateModified. On index.html it also renders the footer’s “Updated” line, so bump it whenever the homepage changes.

URLs are load-bearing

Inbound links from earlier versions of the site still point here, so:

• Leave permalink: /:title/ alone unless you also add redirect_from entries for the old form.
• Old addresses are kept alive through redirect_from (jekyll-redirect-from):
  • /about/ and /page2/ redirect to the homepage.
  • /posts/ and /blog/ redirect to /archive/. A listing should go to a listing, because sending it to the homepage looks like a soft 404.
  • The dated /YYYY/MM/DD/slug/ forms redirect to the clean post URLs.
• /feed.xml (jekyll-feed) and /sitemap.xml must keep those exact paths.
• CNAME must stay in the repo root.