Identity Matters — how to edit the site

The personal site of Abhi Yadav, live at identitymatters.blog. Built with Astro, hosted free on GitHub Pages. No WordPress, no database — just plain text files.

Everything auto-publishes: any change pushed to the main branch rebuilds and deploys to identitymatters.blog in ~30 seconds (via GitHub Actions). No manual steps.

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Where everything lives

What you want to change	File
Name, title, hero text, bio paragraphs, the Feynman quote, email, social links	src/data/site.ts → person, story
Career timeline	src/data/site.ts → timeline
Expertise cards	src/data/site.ts → expertise
Speaking: upcoming banner, video talks, talk list	src/data/site.ts → upcoming, videos, talks
The article list (titles, dates, summaries, thumbnails)	src/data/site.ts → articles
The full text of one article	src/content/articles/<slug>.html
Images	public/images/
Audio	public/audio/
Colors & fonts	src/styles/site.css — the :root[data-direction="warm"][data-theme="light"] block near the top

Most edits are just changing text inside src/data/site.ts — save, push, done.

Add a new article

Three small pieces (or just send Claude the text and it does all three):

1. Thumbnail → public/images/articles/<slug>.jpg The <slug> part of the filename becomes the page URL (/writing/<slug>/).
2. Body → src/content/articles/<slug>.html Plain HTML: <p>…</p>, <h2>…</h2>, <a href>, <img src="/images/…">, etc.
3. An entry at the top of the articles array in src/data/site.ts:

{
  title: 'My New Article',
  date: 'Jun 5, 2026', year: '2026',
  cat: 'IAM', kind: 'article',
  img: '/images/articles/my-new-article.jpg',
  url: '',                       // an external "original", if any — leave '' for a new piece
  source: 'Identity Matters',
  excerpt: 'One-paragraph summary shown on the card and the preview popup.',
}

Newest entries go first. Notes:

• kind: 'audio' + an <audio> tag in the body → native player (put the mp3 in public/audio/).
• kind: 'pdf' + an external url → the card links straight to that PDF (no native page).

Three ways to make an edit

1. Ask Claude (easiest) — describe it; Claude edits and commits.
2. GitHub web editor — open the file at github.com/abhiyadav-code/identitymatters, click the ✏️ pencil, edit, then Commit changes. Auto-deploys.
3. On your computer — npm install once, then npm run dev to preview at localhost:4321, edit, and git push.

Run it locally

npm install      # first time only
npm run dev      # preview at http://localhost:4321
npm run build    # build the static site into ./dist

Hosting & domain

Served at the apex domain identitymatters.blog via GitHub Pages (public/CNAME + the repo's Pages custom-domain setting). The deploy workflow is .github/workflows/deploy.yml and builds with DEPLOY_TARGET=production.