Siddharth Joshi

Siddharth Joshi

MTS at DatologyAI. Fourth Year CS PhD at UCLA. Interested in Data Curation for Efficient and Robust Learning. Always open to chat!

sjoshi804.github.io — maintenance guide

sjoshi804.github.io — maintenance guide

Personal site for Siddharth Joshi (MTS at DatologyAI, leading multimodal data curation). Jekyll, deployed on GitHub Pages from master. Pushing to master redeploys automatically.

How the homepage works (READ THIS FIRST)

The homepage (/) is a fully custom, self-contained page — it does NOT use the minimal-mistakes remote theme. Three files own it:

FileWhat it is
_layouts/home.htmlPage structure + Liquid loops. Rarely needs editing.
assets/css/home.cssAll styling (clean / editorial, light theme).
assets/js/home.jsInteractivity (scroll reveal, stat count-up, pub tabs, news toggle).

_pages/about.md just sets layout: home and permalink: / — it has no body.

To change CONTENT, edit the YAML in _data/ — never touch the HTML. Each file is heavily commented with its schema. The layout loops over these files automatically.

Data fileDrives
_data/site.ymlHero headline/lead, social links, the 4 hero stats, the About story, office hours.
_data/featured.ymlMain “Work” tiles (flagship is feature: true).
_data/mini.ymlThe smaller 3-up “also contributed to” tiles.
_data/roots.yml“Research roots” cards (PhD / earlier work).
_data/publications.ymlOne master papers: list → “Selected” tab (selected: true) + “Full” tab (all).
_data/news.ymlNews timeline (first 4 shown, rest behind a toggle).

Markup conventions inside the YAML

  • Most text fields accept markdown: **bold**, _italic_, [text](url).
  • Highlight a phrase in the hero headline / story quote with [hl]...[/hl].
  • Bold your own name in author lists with [me]Siddharth Joshi[/me].
  • count fields in stats animate up — use the numeric part (e.g. "11.7") plus prefix/suffix for symbols (+, ×, pp).

Common tasks (agent playbook)

  • New paper / preprint → add an entry at the TOP of papers: in _data/publications.yml (newest first); set selected: true to feature it in the “Selected” tab. Also add a one-line entry at the top of _data/news.yml.
  • New flagship project → add a block to _data/featured.yml (set feature: true for the big tile; demote the previous flagship by removing that flag).
  • Update the hero pitch or stats → edit _data/site.yml.
  • Title/SEO/skin for non-home pages → _config.yml.

After any change, verify YAML still parses:

ruby -ryaml -e "YAML.load_file('_data/publications.yml')"

Editorial guidance

  • Voice: confident, concrete, results-first. Lead with the work at DatologyAI (multimodal data curation, VLMs, evals), then earlier research.
  • Keep numbers accurate to the papers/blogs they cite.
  • Baharan Mirzasoleiman / UCLA appear only as factual co-author/affiliation context, not as the framing of the site.

Local preview

System Ruby (2.6) is too old to build Jekyll here. Either rely on the GitHub Pages build after push, or use a newer Ruby (brew install ruby, then bundle install && bundle exec jekyll serve). The custom homepage Liquid can be smoke-tested with the liquid gem directly (stub markdownify/relative_url) without the full theme.