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.

Do Not Fabricate

Never invent details about how something works when you don’t actually know. If you haven’t read the code or verified the mechanism, say “I don’t know how this works” rather than confecting a plausible-sounding explanation. Making things up poisons the project’s documentation and memory — a confident falsehood in a comment or note will mislead future sessions (and humans) who trust it at face value. State what you’ve observed, flag what you’re unsure about, and leave blanks rather than filling them with fiction. This applies to comments in code, notes in this file, commit messages, and any other written output.

Writing Conventions for Claude

Do not drop articles (“a”, “an”, “the”) from commit messages, prose, or any other written text. Write in complete, natural English rather than telegraphic shorthand. Dropping articles makes text read like a telegram and is especially noticeable in commit messages, which become part of the permanent project history. Before finalizing any commit message or written output, re-read it and check that every noun phrase that needs an article has one. Pay special attention to commit subject lines, where there’s a temptation to compress — “Clean up redirect test” should be “Clean up the redirect test.”

Commit messages should explain reasoning and motivation (“why”), not restate the diff (“what”). A good commit message reads like a short note to a future reader explaining the decision, not a changelog entry listing which files changed.

When migrating or reorganizing files, separate the mechanical move from any edits to the moved files. First commit the files with their original content and structure preserved exactly, then commit the modifications (frontmatter rewrites, link fixes, etc.) as a separate change. This makes each commit independently reviewable and keeps the move diffable.

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.

Build and Deploy

Never build any of the Jekyll sites locally — the local Ruby/Jekyll setup is fragile and not worth the trouble. To verify changes on the live site, ask the user to push, wait about five minutes for GitHub Pages to build, and then fetch the live URL.

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), circe (literary text), and notes (economics teaching notes, deployed at /notes/). A detailed audit of all these sites lives in claude_audits.md in this repo.

TODOs

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 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 (now at notes/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:

302/graphs.md (in the notes repo) is the current version, using kgjs (KineticGraphs). It loads YML config files from 302/graphs/*.yml and renders them client-side with kg3d.0.2.6.js. These support click-and-drag interaction.
302/graphs2.md (in the notes repo) is the older version, using Highcharts. It embeds the 9 HTML files in 302/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 now live in the notes repo (at notes/econ/). They’re pre-Jekyll study notes that aren’t linked from anywhere in the current nav tree but are still actively served via redirect stubs in the main repo.

¶ Claude Notes

¶ Writing Style

¶ Do Not Fabricate

¶ Writing Conventions for Claude

¶ How to Use This File

¶ Build and Deploy

¶ Project Context

¶ TODOs

¶ Redirect Strategy Test (2026-03-19)

¶ Project Context — Research

¶ Observations