Handoff: Promote remittances paper, self-host all PDFs, and add Fed disclaimer

Task: dark-mode-mobile-polish Version: v1 Date: 2026-08-11 Timestamp: 2026-08-11 17:23 Session: 2024415b-5ce1-4639-9e9a-c498f8e6dc5d Model: Claude Opus 5 Author: Adi Soenarjo adityasoenarjo@gmail.com

Purpose

Three related goals on the public academic site:

Promote “The Macroeconomics of International Remittance Flows” from Work in Progress to Working Papers, now that a circulating draft exists — with a new abstract, download buttons, and a coauthor link.
Stop depending on nbviewer. Every paper, slide deck, and the CV were previously served through nbviewer.org proxying a separate repo (soenarjo/website). That chain has four external failure points; all PDFs are now hosted in this repo.
Add the required Federal Reserve disclaimer to the site footer.

A canonical-URL misconfiguration was found and fixed along the way.

Note on the task name: it is taken from the git branch, which predates this session’s work. Nothing here relates to dark mode or mobile polish specifically, though changes were verified in both themes and at phone width.

What Changed

_pages/papers.md — the bulk of the work:

Moved the remittances paper to the top of ## Working Papers, above Liquidity and Labor Reallocation, structured like the existing GVC entry.
Replaced its abstract with the new four-result + two-country-HANK text, split into two <p> blocks. Fixed PDF line-wrap hyphenation artifacts carried in from the paste (in- dividuals, pri- vate, Lever- aging, sender- currency, en- dogenous) while preserving genuine hyphens. Used − and — entities.
Emptied the ## Work in Progress section (heading and separator retained).
Linked coauthor M. Ludovica Ambrosino to her Google Sites page.
Renamed all three PDF buttons to Paper; left the Discussion button unchanged.
Added an Appendix button to the remittances entry, positioned between Paper and Alternate.
Changed the Liquidity status line from New version forthcoming. to June 2025.
Repointed every button at /assets/pdf/… and removed all three Alternate buttons (see Design Decisions).

assets/pdf/ (new, untracked before this session) — six PDFs, 12 MB total: remittances.pdf, remittances_appendix.pdf, reallocation.pdf, gvcs.pdf, discussion_Florio_Siena_Zago.pdf, CV_Soenarjo.pdf.

_includes/footer/custom.html — added the disclaimer div:

<div class="page__footer-disclaimer">Disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own
and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston or
the Federal Reserve System.</div>

assets/css/main.scss — a #footer > footer flex block ordering the disclaimer below the theme’s copyright line, plus .page__footer-disclaimer added to the existing dark-mode footer color rule.

_config.yml — sidebar CV link repointed to /assets/pdf/CV_Soenarjo.pdf; url: corrected from https://soenarjo.github.io to https://www.soenarjo.com.

_data/navigation.yml — top-nav CV link repointed to the local path.

Inputs / Outputs

Inputs

Six PDFs placed by the user in assets/pdf/ (largest: reallocation.pdf 4.9 MB, remittances_appendix.pdf 4.6 MB).
New abstract text and the coauthor’s URL, supplied in-session.

Outputs

Static site built by Jekyll. Each PDF gets a permanent public URL of the form https://www.soenarjo.com/assets/pdf/<filename>.pdf.

Local build (per project CLAUDE.md — destination outside Dropbox, no watch):

eval "$(rbenv init -)" && bundle exec jekyll serve --destination /tmp/jekyll-site --no-watch

Note: a bundle install was required this session — commonmarker, racc, eventmachine, http_parser.rb, json, and bigdecimal were missing locally.

Design Decisions

Self-hosting over nbviewer. The old chain depended on nbviewer staying alive, the website repo keeping its name, the branch staying main, and GitHub’s blob URL format. The new URLs depend only on the domain and the file path. Jekyll copies assets/pdf/ verbatim — _config.yml’s exclude: list needed no change.

assets/pdf/ as the location. Mirrors the existing assets/css, assets/js, assets/images convention and confines every binary to one directory.

Unversioned filenames. PDFs are overwritten in place on revision rather than suffixed with dates or version numbers, so URLs already circulating in referee emails and paper title pages keep resolving to the current draft.

Alternate buttons removed. They existed solely as a fallback for nbviewer failing to render. With local hosting they would point at the same file via an external repo being migrated away from. User confirmed removal.

Flex ordering for the footer disclaimer. Minimal Mistakes renders _includes/footer/custom.html before its copyright div, so without order the disclaimer would sit above “Powered by Jekyll”. The alternative — copying the theme’s footer.html into the repo — would break the deliberate “no theme source files in repo” arrangement documented in CLAUDE.md. A margin-top was tried and removed: in dark mode .page__footer-copyright carries a darker background panel, and the gap split it into two detached bands.

Repo weight accepted. 12 MB against GitHub’s 1 GB soft limit; at realistic revision rates (~33 MB/year) that is decades of headroom. The global “never commit large files” rule targets research data repos, where a committed .dta is a mistake — here the PDFs are the deliverable.

Known Limitations and TODOs

The PDFs’ own “Latest Version” links still point at nbviewer. Visible on the remittances title page. These live in the LaTeX source, not the site. Update to https://www.soenarjo.com/assets/pdf/<name>.pdf (or to /papers/, which survives a rename and shows abstract + appendix + R&R status) after this branch merges — the URLs 404 until Pages deploys.
## Work in Progress is an empty heading followed by a horizontal rule. Renders as a visible gap, more noticeably on mobile. Either populate it or comment out the heading.
CDN caching: overwriting a PDF at a stable path can serve stale copies for a while. Hard-refresh (Cmd+Shift+R) to verify after deploy.
remittances_appendix.pdf (4.6 MB) and reallocation.pdf (4.9 MB) dominate repo growth; each revision commits a full new copy. Compressing embedded figures before committing is worth the habit if revisions become frequent.
Dark-mode footer text sits on a slightly darker panel than the surrounding footer (#0d1b2a vs #112240) — pre-existing, matched rather than fixed.

Verification Performed

Full Jekyll build clean on every change.
All six PDF URLs return 200 application/pdf; SHA-256 checksums match the source files byte for byte.
Every PDF in assets/pdf/ confirmed referenced by _pages/papers.md, _config.yml, or _data/navigation.yml — no orphans.
Zero nbviewer or soenarjo/website references remain in source.
Canonical tag and og:url now emit https://www.soenarjo.com/…; zero soenarjo.github.io strings remain in built HTML or XML.
Click-through tested in Chrome: nav CV, sidebar CV, and the remittances Paper button all open the correct document in the browser’s native viewer.
Rendering checked in dark mode, light mode, and at 414 px phone width.

Change Log

Version	Date	Summary
v1	2026-08-11	Promote remittances paper; self-host all PDFs off nbviewer; footer disclaimer; canonical URL fix

Aditya Soenarjo