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Robert Winslow

Claude Notes

This file serves as Claude’s working memory for the RMWinslow.github.io project. Rather than relying on the separate .claude/ memory system, store observations, context, and notes here so they stay visible in the repo and are easy to review.

Writing Style

When taking notes in this file, use natural flowing language rather than terse bullet fragments. Write as though explaining things to a colleague — complete sentences, clear reasoning, enough context that the note makes sense on its own months later. Bullet points are fine for lists of items, but each bullet should still read as a coherent thought.

How to Use This File

  • Memories go here. Any context, observations, or learned details about the project that would be useful across conversations should be written directly into this file rather than (or in addition to) the .claude/ memory directory. This keeps everything version-controlled and human-readable.
  • TODOs go here. Track outstanding tasks, ideas, and next steps in the TODOs section below. Check items off as they’re completed. If a TODO grows complex enough to need its own tracking, note that here and point to where the detail lives.
  • Update regularly. When you learn something new about the project, finish a task, or notice something worth remembering, update this file in the same conversation rather than waiting.

Project Context

This is Robert Winslow’s personal academic website, built with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages. It uses the custom RMWinslow/JTD-RMW theme (a fork of Just the Docs). The site contains teaching materials, research pages, and notes primarily related to economics.

There are several sibling repos that share the same theme: posts (blog), bib (bibliography), games (game rules), and circe (literary text). A detailed audit of all these sites lives in claude_audits.md in this repo.

TODOs

  • Fix 3 phantom parents in this repo: “Competitive Equilibrium”, “Aggregate Measurement”, and “Money and Banking” all have has_children: true but no child pages reference them.
  • Review the 31 broken internal links identified in claude_audits.md for this site (mostly legacy HTML files with wrong relative paths to sakura.css).
  • Consider adding search_exclude: true to the 104 legacy HTML files that lack frontmatter, to keep them out of the search index.
  • Create markdown-based posts for research projects instead of just hosting PDFs. The idea is to write shorter, more approachable descriptions of each research project in natural language — something a visitor can actually read on the site — while still including nice images, key figures, and links to the full papers. Think of these as accessible summaries rather than formal abstracts.

  • Consider splitting the notes section out into its own subsite (a separate repo with its own GitHub Pages deployment, like posts, games, etc.). The notes are already a fairly self-contained collection under their own nav parent, so they might be a natural candidate for separation. Worth weighing whether the added repo overhead is justified by the organizational clarity.

    The main motivation is gaining a third level of nav hierarchy. JTD only supports three levels, and with Notes as a top-level section, the actual content is squeezed into two. Moving notes to its own site makes “Intermediate Macro Notes” a top-level parent with room to nest beneath it.

    Redirect strategy (decided 2026-03-18): Use a consolidated redirect directory in the main repo rather than scattering stubs at the original paths. Each stub is a small .md file with an explicit permalink and redirect_to, all kept in one folder:

    # redirects/3102-topic-overview.md
---
permalink: /3102/topic-overview
redirect_to: https://notes.rmwinslow.com/3102/topic-overview
---

    Jekyll generates the redirect page at the original URL (single hop, no chain). The template includes <link rel="canonical"> and <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> which is what search engines use to transfer link equity.

    Use redirects/ (no underscore) to avoid Jekyll’s default _-prefixed directory exclusion, or use _redirects/ with include: [_redirects] in _config.yml.

    Redirect test results (2026-03-19): Confirmed working end-to-end. See the “Redirect Strategy Test” section below for the full narrative.

    Scope after cleanup: The 101/ and 202/ directories have been removed (deleted and moved to Teaching-Notes respectively), and 330/ has been moved to Teaching-Notes. This leaves only 3102/ content plus notes.md and econ/UMNelectives.md to redirect — roughly 25-28 stubs instead of the original 43.

    Also consolidate the mynotes repo (currently on the minimal-mistakes theme at a separate URL) into the new notes repo. This would bring all of Robert’s notes under one roof with a shared JTD-RMW theme.

  • Add a link back to the main site (www.rmwinslow.com) in each subsite’s navigation. The subsites (posts, games, bib, circe, and the future notes) don’t currently have an obvious way to get back to the root site. JTD-RMW supports nav_external_links in _config.yml — the main site already uses this for the Blog link.
  • Fix metadata on the CV files in files/. The PDFs there (e.g. “CV Robert Winslow - Job Market.pdf”, “CV Robert Winslow.pdf”, “CV - Robert Winslow - Jan 2025.docx”) could use updated document properties (title, author, dates) so they present cleanly when shared or indexed.
  • In the posts repo, replace the orphaned-parent hack for hiding pages with proper nav_exclude: true. Four pages (“Games Free with Amazon Prime”, “Novels”, “NES A-Z”, “Web Fiction”) use a nonexistent parent value like "hidden" or "_Media" to keep themselves out of the sidebar. That works but is fragile and unclear — nav_exclude: true is the intended mechanism.
  • Clean up duplicate directory trees in the legacy econ/ area. econ/teaching/3102/typesetting/ and econ/teaching/typesetting/ contain identical files. econ/teaching/3102/intertemporal/intertemporal/ is a duplicated subdirectory inside itself, complete with duplicate SVG images. One copy of each should be deleted.
  • Remove Windows copy-paste artifacts from the repo: files named things like consumerInteractive (2).html, LBDconcepts - Copy (2).html, LBDconcepts - Copy (3).html, twoPeriodEndowment (2).html, sakura copy.css, sakuraPink - Copy.css. These are accidental duplicates that add clutter.
  • Add .lyx~, .lyx.emergency, and __pycache__/ to .gitignore, then remove the ones already committed. There are dozens of LyX backup files in econ/research/ and econ/tradeprelim/, plus a Python bytecode cache in econ/research/ContagionThing/__pycache__/.
  • Clean up or reorganize econ/research/ContagionThing/. This is the messiest single directory — 80+ files including Python scripts, LyX drafts, backup files, simulation output images, 28 pasted*.png screenshots with no clear labels, and a .graphml file. It reads like a working directory that was committed wholesale. Worth deciding what to keep vs archive.

  • Clean up the styles/ directory — most of these files are dead weight.

    Audited 2026-03-18. Of the 22 CSS/SCSS files in styles/, only 6 are actually referenced by any HTML page in the repo. All of them are used exclusively by the legacy pre-Jekyll HTML files; the Jekyll site itself uses the JTD-RMW theme CSS and doesn’t touch any of these.

    Actively used:

    File Pages Notes
    sakura.css ~60 The main workhorse — used by legacy HTML across econ/
    basic.css 1 Only index.html
    basic_sakura.css ~8 Trade prelim pages in econ/tradeprelim/
    sakuraBlue.css 3 Jones macro prelim pages
    sakuraGreen.css 2 Chari macro prelim pages
    sakuraPink.css 3 Kehoe macro prelim pages

    The color variants are a fun detail — they’re professor-specific theming for the macro prelim study notes. Chari gets green, Kehoe gets pink, Jones gets blue.

    Effectively dead (1): everythingbagel.css is linked from _layouts/default_basic.html, but no page in the repo uses that layout.

    Completely unreferenced — safe to delete (15): TODOsakuraSolar.css, classless.css, everythingbagel-JTD.css, everythingbagel-lists.css, main.scss, panfried.css, sakura copy.css, sakura solarized test 2.css, sakura-earthly.scss.txt, sakura-paper.scss, sakuraPink - Copy.css, sakuraUMN.css, sakura_basic.css, style.css, sakura.css.map. Also assets/css/extrabits.css is unreferenced.

  • Rename or remove font/sdfsdfds.ttf — it’s a keyboard-mash test font filename that got committed. Either give it a real name or delete it if it’s not used.

Redirect Strategy Test (2026-03-19)

As part of the plan to split the economics notes into their own repo, we needed to verify that the proposed redirect strategy actually works before committing to a full migration. The idea is simple: when the notes move to a new notes repo deployed at www.rmwinslow.com/notes/, redirect stubs in the main repo should seamlessly send visitors from the old URLs to the new ones. But “should work” and “does work” are different things, especially with GitHub Pages, Jekyll theme interactions, and baseurl pathing all in the mix. So we ran a minimum viable test.

We created a small notes repo with baseurl: /notes in its _config.yml, a bare-bones index.md landing page, and a test.md page whose only purpose was to exist at www.rmwinslow.com/notes/test as a redirect target. On the main repo side, we created redirects/test-redirect.md — a file with nothing but permalink: /test-redirect and redirect_to: /notes/test in its frontmatter. The redirects/ folder (no underscore prefix) was chosen so Jekyll would process it without needing any include directive in _config.yml. We then pushed both repos and waited for the GitHub Pages builds to complete.

The results confirmed everything works as intended. Curling the redirect stub at www.rmwinslow.com/test-redirect returned a lightweight HTML page generated by jekyll-redirect-from with three redirect mechanisms: a JavaScript location assignment, an instant <meta http-equiv="refresh">, and a <link rel="canonical"> pointing to the target. The page also included <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> to keep the stub out of search indexes. GitHub Pages served this as a normal 200 response (not a 301 or 302), which is expected — GitHub Pages only serves static files, so the redirect happens client-side. Google treats instant meta refresh redirects as permanent redirects according to their own documentation, so this is fine for SEO purposes.

Curling the target at www.rmwinslow.com/notes/test returned a fully rendered JTD-RMW themed page with all assets (CSS, JS, fonts) correctly resolving under the /notes/ base path. The nav sidebar showed up, the search bar was present, MathJax loaded — the whole theme came through cleanly. The baseurl: /notes setting worked exactly as expected, and the notes repo is properly deployed as a subdirectory of the main domain rather than a subdomain.

One detail worth noting: the redirect_to value was a relative path (/notes/test) rather than an absolute URL, and jekyll-redirect-from correctly expanded it to the full https://www.rmwinslow.com/notes/test URL in the generated redirect page. This means the redirect stubs can use site-relative paths, which is cleaner and more portable than hardcoding the full domain.

The redirect is a single hop — there is no intermediate redirect or chain. A visitor hitting /test-redirect goes straight to /notes/test in one step. This was a key requirement to avoid redirect chains that slow down page loads and can confuse search engine crawlers.

After verifying everything, we deleted the test files from both repos. The test confirmed that the redirect strategy described in the TODOs section above is sound and ready for the full migration whenever we’re ready to move the 3102/ content over.

The SEO research supporting the subdirectory deployment choice (over a subdomain) is documented in claude_audits.md at the end of the file.

Project Context — Research

The job market paper (“How much did Bonus Unemployment Insurance Payments During the COVID Pandemic Depress Aggregate Employment?”) is currently under review as of March 2026. Listed at research/jmp.md.

Robert is no longer at UMN — the Econ Electives page (econ/UMNelectives.md) has been hidden from nav accordingly.

The 101/ directory (Principles of Micro) has been deleted — it was just placeholders. The 202/ directory (Principles of Macro) has been moved to the private Teaching-Notes repo at 202/_legacy website draft notes (incorporate later). Only inflation-costs.md had real content; the other two pages were placeholders with extensive research notes hidden in HTML comments. This reduces the notes migration scope and eliminates two redirect stubs.

Observations

There are two generations of interactive economics graphs in the repo, both nav-hidden but actively served:

  • 3102/graphs.md is the current version, using kgjs (KineticGraphs). It loads YML config files from 3102/graphs/*.yml and renders them client-side with kg3d.0.2.6.js. These support click-and-drag interaction.

  • 3102/graphs2.md is the older version, using Highcharts. It embeds the 9 HTML files in 3102/highcharts/ via iframes and provides standalone links to each. These files are self-contained (no external CSS, no sakura) and still functional. They’re not orphaned legacy — they’re intentionally kept as a working fallback.

The legacy econ/ HTML files that use sakura.css are a separate matter entirely — those are pre-Jekyll study notes that aren’t linked from anywhere in the current nav tree.