Website update instructions

Personal academic site for Mohammad Zhalechian. Jekyll (academicpages theme). Content lives in _pages/*.md; GitHub Pages builds on push to master, so a push to master is a publish. There is no staging branch.

Repo: https://github.com/mzhalechian/mzhalechian.github.io.git Live: https://mzhalechian.github.io/

Previewing changes

Jekyll cannot currently be run on this machine — only system Ruby 2.6 is available, and bundle install for the github-pages gem never resolves (it spins at multi-GB memory). Don’t retry it; it wastes several minutes.

To preview instead: fetch the live page from https://mzhalechian.github.io/, inject the edit into that HTML, and serve the result on 127.0.0.1:4000. The surrounding rendering is then byte-identical to production.

Do not hand-render the markdown with another engine (e.g. Python-Markdown). Its list spacing differs from kramdown’s — loose vs. tight <li> — which makes untouched content look restyled and sends the review off on a false trail.

The two CV files

The CV exists as two LaTeX projects in /Users/mzhale/Dropbox/Apps/Overleaf/ (this folder syncs to Overleaf, so edits there appear in the Overleaf account):

There is also an older +MZ - CV - website project built on a previous template (old.tex). It is stale and unused — ignore it, don’t edit or delete it.

What differs between master and duplicate

The duplicate is a copy of the master with exactly two deviations. Everything else must stay identical.

1. Working Papers status lines (the reason the duplicate exists):
   • Under review → drop the journal name. Under Review at Operations Research becomes Under Review.
   • Under revision → keep the journal name, e.g. Major Revision at Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.
   • Reject & Resubmit → treated as under review: Under Review, with neither the journal name nor the R&R status shown.
2. A stray \end{rSection} just before \end{document} is removed. See Known issues.

Which file to edit

• Real CV content (new paper, new award, new talk) → edit both files, so they don’t drift. Same edit, same place in each.
• The status-line rule above → duplicate only.

Publishing the CV

1. Refresh the duplicate from the master if the master has moved on, then re-apply the two deviations.
2. Compile the duplicate. pdflatex is at /Library/TeX/texbin; run it 2–3 times so page refs settle. Build in a scratch directory, not in the Dropbox folder — otherwise .aux/.log files sync into Overleaf.
3. Sanity-check the new PDF against the previous one: page count and section headers should match unless the change was meant to alter them. (Section headers extract as uppercase, e.g. HONORS AND AWARDS.)
4. Only the compiled PDF goes into this repo — copy it to the repo root as CV_MohammadZhalechian.pdf and commit. The .tex stays in Overleaf; never add .tex, .cls, or build artifacts here.
5. _pages/cv.md links to https://mzhalechian.github.io/CV_MohammadZhalechian.pdf. It used to be a Google Drive link — don’t go back to that. Overwriting the PDF at this same path keeps the link stable, so nothing needs re-sharing.

GitHub Pages takes roughly 1–2 minutes to rebuild; verify the live URL rather than assuming the push took effect.

Keeping content in sync

A paper award appears in four places. When adding one, do all four:

• _pages/awards.md — top-level list, newest first
• _pages/research.md — sub-bullet under the relevant paper, newest first
• CV Honors and Awards section — both .tex files
• CV entry for that specific paper — both .tex files, newest bullet first

Site navigation is _data/navigation.yml. As of Aug 2026 the menu is Research / Teaching / CV, with two deliberate choices — don’t “helpfully” undo either:

• The Awards tab was removed. _pages/awards.md still exists and /awards/ is still live, just unlinked. Keep maintaining it as above.
• The CV tab points straight at the PDF (/CV_MohammadZhalechian.pdf), not at /cv/. The intermediate “You can find my CV here” page was redundant. _pages/cv.md still exists and /cv/ still works, also unlinked.

Known issues

• The master new3/CV.tex has a stray duplicate \end{rSection} just before \end{document} (as of Aug 2026). It makes pdflatex fail with \begin{document} ended by \end{list} and produce no PDF. The duplicate has it removed; the master still has it and does not compile as-is. Re-remove it whenever the duplicate is refreshed from the master, until it’s fixed upstream.
• .DS_Store shows as modified constantly (Google Drive folder). Leave it out of commits.

Change log

• Aug 2026 — Added “2026 Finalist, MIF Paper Competition” to awards.md, as a sub-bullet under the Contextual Learning with Online Convex Optimization paper in research.md, and to both CV files (Honors and Awards + that paper’s bullet list). Moved the CV off Google Drive to the repo-hosted PDF. Created the +MZ - CV - new3 (website) duplicate and applied the status-line rule to it.
• Aug 2026 — Removed the Awards tab from the menu and pointed the CV tab directly at the PDF. Both pages kept, unlinked.