personal-website-claude-skill

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Why I made this

For a young researcher or engineer today, a personal homepage is close to required. It's where a hiring manager, a recruiter, a PI, or a program chair decides — in about thirty seconds — whether to read your paper, open your side project, forward your CV, or book an interview.

When I was applying to schools, a senior I trusted mentioned — in passing — that I'd need a personal site before sending anything out. I tried a couple of existing site builders, and tried hand-writing HTML from scratch. None of it came together fast enough during an application cycle where every day mattered.

So I wrote this skill — the thing I wish had existed for that version of me. You give it three URLs; it drafts the site, deploys to GitHub Pages, reviews itself, and hands back the link. Free, MIT, open source.

Hoping it saves somebody else that week.

Who it's for

I wrote this thinking mostly about young professionals — PhD applicants, postdocs, and visiting students on the academic side; new grads going into SWE / ML / data / PM roles, return-offer candidates, and mid-career engineers changing companies on the industry side. The market is hard right now across both tracks. Cycles close earlier every year, referrals have replaced cold applications, and every group chat has someone exhausted, refreshing their inbox at midnight, comparing themselves to whoever's Twitter looks like they already made it. I'm one of those people too.

What actually moves the needle in a crowded market is being findable. When a recruiter, a hiring manager, a program chair, or a potential advisor searches your name, the first thing they land on frames you before any interview does. A clean, current homepage is a small-but-real signal: this person is active, thoughtful, and serious about their work.

I don't want cost or front-end taste to be the reason any of us skips that step. Squarespace is $144/year. al-folio takes a weekend you don't have. Design sense isn't distributed evenly, and neither is time. So I wrote the skill I wished existed when I started my own page, and I'm open-sourcing it for free, MIT, no strings.

If you're applying anywhere this cycle — grad school, full-time roles, internships, return offers, a visa-sponsored switch — use it. Ship something imperfect and iterate. Being seen matters more than being perfect, and both matter more than being invisible. You already did the hard part; this is the five-minute part.

⚡ Install (10 seconds)

Path 1 — Terminal CLI (recommended, zero session-cache issues):

claude plugin marketplace add GPZ12138/personal-website-claude-skill
claude plugin install personal-website-claude-skill

Run these in a regular terminal, not inside a running Claude Code session. This is the fastest and most reliable path — the plugin registers globally (user scope) and every future Claude Code session on this machine will see it.

Path 2 — Inside a Claude Code session:

/plugin marketplace add GPZ12138/personal-website-claude-skill

Then restart the Claude Code session (exit, then claude again) before running:

/plugin install personal-website-claude-skill

The restart is required because Claude Code's in-session plugin index is populated at startup — running /plugin install right after /plugin marketplace add in the same session can fail with "Plugin not found in any marketplace" even though the marketplace was just added successfully. This is a session-cache quirk, not a manifest problem.

Path 3 — install.sh (user-global skill, no plugin system):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GPZ12138/personal-website-claude-skill/main/install.sh | bash

Symlinks the skill directly into ~/.claude/skills/. Works without the plugin / marketplace layer.

Path 4 — manual clone + symlink: see docs/INSTALL.md.

💬 Then say

Open Claude Code in an empty folder and type something like:

"Build me a personal homepage. I'm an ML engineer / researcher / new grad / PhD applicant — whatever fits. LinkedIn: <your-linkedin-url> GitHub: <your-github-username> Scholar: <your-scholar-url> (skip if you don't have one)"

The skill asks for anything missing, proposes a section-by-section plan, and — once you confirm — runs end-to-end (fetch → draft → deploy → review → redeploy) without interrupting. A typical run is 8–20 minutes depending on how much the reviewer agent flags.

If you'd rather not have Claude Code guess, attach a resume PDF too. It helps with dates, GPA, publication metadata.

📦 What it produces

• Static single-page site — index.html, styles.css, script.js, assets/. Nothing else.
• Two-column layout — sticky sidebar (photo, name, citation stats, contact grid) and a main column with About, News, Publications, Experience, Honors, Education, Skills, Contact.
• Live Google Scholar widget — citation count, h-index, per-year chart, updated daily by a polite two-tier poll (a lightweight check that only triggers the full scrape when a number actually changed).
• Bilingual toggle — English by default, plus a second language auto-picked from whatever language you're chatting with the skill in (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, …). Not hardcoded to any one pairing. Off by default; opt in during clarification.
• Light / dark theme — respects prefers-color-scheme, persists via localStorage.
• Mobile-responsive — two-column collapses at <960px, nav hides on phones, safe-area insets on iOS, 40×40px minimum touch targets, prefers-reduced-motion honored.
• A GitHub Actions workflow that runs the Scholar sync daily, at a non-round minute to avoid the hourly rate-limit peak.
• **Deployed