Published note · May 11, 2026
Rebuilding the research site
How Astro and Pagefind connect my research, datasets, and teaching sites.
- Author
- Ian Helfrich
- Status
- Published note
- Topics
- meta · tooling
- Reading note
- This entry records its publication context. Later revisions are dated explicitly.
My papers, datasets, and teaching materials were spread across several repositories. Some used Quarto, others Cesium or Jekyll. Someone arriving at one project had little help finding the others, and search stopped at each site’s boundary.
I built this site in Astro to provide a common index. Research, project, dataset, and writing entries live in versioned content files. Pagefind searches the published pages, including indexed copies of the linked teaching sites. The RSS feed collects updates from this site.
The individual projects keep the software they need. Quarto supports longer teaching material with executable analysis; Cesium supports spatial visualization. Moving them all to Astro would add maintenance work without improving those capabilities.
The source is edited in a text editor and committed to Git. There is no separate content-management system. Papers, data releases, software, and teaching materials each have their own entry and release status.
Originally published May 2026; revised September 2026.