Migration: Project Site → GitHub User Site

Migrating this academicpages (Jekyll) site from a project site served under a subdirectory to a user site served at the domain root.

The repository name must be exactly rasikamurali.github.io for GitHub Pages to serve it at the root of https://rasikamurali.github.io/.

Changes made (code)

All internal links, asset paths, CSS/JS, the CV iframe, favicons, and the sitemap page already use the theme’s base_path helper (derived from site.url + site.baseurl), so correcting site.url fixes every path at once. No hard-coded subdirectory paths existed anywhere except _config.yml.

1. _config.yml
   • url → https://rasikamurali.github.io (was the old subdirectory URL).
   • repository → Rasikamurali/Rasikamurali.github.io (new repo name; drives site.github metadata).
   • baseurl → left "" (correct for a root-served user site).
   • description → updated to a research-focused summary (also the SEO/OG fallback).
   • og_description → set to the provided research description (Open Graph fallback).
   • og_image → intentionally left blank (setting it makes the theme emit a misleading Organization JSON-LD; the share image + Person schema are set in custom head instead).

2. _includes/seo.html — added support for a per-page seo_title front-matter key that fully overrides the <title> (falls back to the theme’s default behavior otherwise). Non-invasive: only pages that set seo_title are affected.

3. _pages/about.md (homepage) — added front matter:
   • seo_title: "Rasika Muralidharan | LLM Multi-Agent Systems, Social Norms, and AI Safety"
   • description: a grounded research summary for the meta description / OG / Twitter card.
   • Visible page content and design are unchanged.
4. _includes/head/custom.html
   • Added a default og:image, and twitter:card / twitter:title / twitter:description / twitter:image (the theme only emitted Twitter tags when a Twitter username was set).
   • Added a homepage-only schema.org Person JSON-LD block. Every field is grounded in _config.yml or the info provided (name, jobTitle, affiliations, knowsAbout research areas, description, email, and sameAs: Google Scholar, GitHub, Bluesky). No awards, extra titles, or profiles were invented.
   • Changed the one favicon line that used a root-absolute path (/images/favicon.ico) to use base_path for consistency.
5. robots.txt (new, repo root) — allows all crawlers and points to the sitemap:

   User-agent: *
   Allow: /
   
   Sitemap: https://rasikamurali.github.io/sitemap.xml
   

Not changed (already correct)

• Sitemap — generated automatically by the jekyll-sitemap plugin at /sitemap.xml.
• Navigation (_data/navigation.yml) — already uses root-relative URLs (/publications/, etc.).
• Favicons — already present in images/ and referenced in custom head.
• No noindex directive exists anywhere in the site.

Local build / validation command

The project builds with Jekyll via the included Docker/devcontainer setup (no local Ruby needed):

# Option A — Docker Compose (serves at http://localhost:4000)
docker compose up

# Option B — VS Code: "Reopen in Container" (uses .devcontainer), then it serves automatically

# Option C — local Ruby toolchain
bundle install
bundle exec jekyll build          # production build into _site/
bundle exec jekyll serve -l -H localhost   # live preview at http://localhost:4000

Note: _config.yml changes are not hot-reloaded — restart the server after editing it.

In this migration, _config.yml (YAML) and the new Person JSON-LD were validated as well-formed; the full Jekyll build must be run in the devcontainer/Docker or with a local Ruby install, as no Ruby toolchain was available in the editing environment.

GitHub Pages deployment steps

This site uses GitHub Pages’ native Jekyll build (no custom Actions deploy workflow — the only workflow, scrape_talks.yml, just scrapes talk data).

1. ✅ Done — the repository was renamed on GitHub to Rasikamurali.github.io (Settings → General → Repository name). GitHub serves the Pages host in lowercase, so the site URL is still https://rasikamurali.github.io/.
2. Update your local remote to match:

   git remote set-url origin https://github.com/Rasikamurali/Rasikamurali.github.io.git
   

3. Commit and push these changes to the default branch (master).
4. Settings → Pages: set Source = Deploy from a branch, Branch = master (or main), folder = / (root).
5. Wait for the Pages build to finish, then load https://rasikamurali.github.io/.
6. (Optional) The old project URL will 404 after the rename. GitHub auto-redirects the old repo name to the new one for git operations, but not for Pages URLs.

Google Search Console

1. Go to https://search.google.com/search-console and add a property.
   • Easiest: URL prefix property for https://rasikamurali.github.io/.
2. Verify ownership using the HTML tag method: Search Console gives a google-site-verification content string. Paste it into _config.yml:

   google_site_verification : "YOUR_TOKEN_HERE"
   

   (The theme already renders this meta tag when the value is set — see _includes/seo.html.) Commit, push, wait for deploy, then click Verify.

3. Submit the sitemap: in Search Console → Sitemaps, submit sitemap.xml (full URL https://rasikamurali.github.io/sitemap.xml).

Request indexing

• In Search Console, use the URL Inspection tool: enter https://rasikamurali.github.io/, then click Request Indexing. Repeat for key pages (/publications/, /cv/, /talks/).
• Indexing is not instant — allow days to weeks.

Verify the canonical URL

• Load the homepage, View Source, and confirm:

  <link rel="canonical" href="https://rasikamurali.github.io/">
  <title>Rasika Muralidharan | LLM Multi-Agent Systems, Social Norms, and AI Safety</title>
  <meta property="og:url" content="https://rasikamurali.github.io/">
  

• Confirm the canonical does not contain /rasikamuralidharan.github.io/.
• Validate the structured data at https://validator.schema.org/ or https://search.google.com/test/rich-results (paste the live URL) and confirm the Person entity is detected with the expected fields.
• Confirm no noindex: curl -s https://rasikamurali.github.io/ | grep -i noindex returns nothing.
• Confirm robots.txt: open https://rasikamurali.github.io/robots.txt.

Test for broken links

After deploy, run a link checker against the live site:

# html-proofer against the built _site (run in the devcontainer / with Ruby)
bundle exec htmlproofer ./_site --disable-external

# or a crawler against the live URL
npx linkinator https://rasikamurali.github.io/ --recurse
# or
npx broken-link-checker https://rasikamurali.github.io/ -ro

Pay special attention to: the CV PDF iframe (/files/cv.pdf), navigation links, publication/talk links, the profile image, and favicons.

Assumptions

• GitHub username is rasikamurali; the repo will be renamed to rasikamurali.github.io and served at the root. (The current git remote owner is Rasikamurali; GitHub owner names are case-insensitive.)
• Default branch is master (current) — adjust the Pages source if you switch to main.
• The Bluesky sameAs URL was derived from the handle in _config.yml (https://bsky.app/profile/rasikamurali.bsky.social). Correct it if your handle differs.
• orcid / pubmed in _config.yml are still template placeholders and were excluded from the structured data (not invented). Fill them in and add to sameAs when ready.