How this site works: Astro, Cloudflare, and a daily paper pipeline

Welcome to the new home of my academic site — now at cdtian.com, bilingual, and with a robot doing part of the editorial work.

The stack

• Astro builds every page to static HTML — publications come from a BibTeX file, projects and posts from Markdown.
• Cloudflare Pages serves the site; every push to the private GitHub repository triggers a fresh deployment.
• Pagefind indexes the whole site at build time, so search works with zero backend.
• Giscus powers comments through GitHub Discussions — free, ad-free, and standard in academia.
• Astro i18n routing serves English at / and Chinese under /zh/.

The daily digest

The part I like most: every morning at 08:00 (Athens time), a GitHub Actions workflow

1. pulls the last 48 hours of new arXiv submissions in cs.RO / cs.LG / cs.SY,
2. scores them against my research profile (modular, reconfigurable, legged, locomotion, MPC, WBC…),
3. enriches the top candidates with Semantic Scholar citation data,
4. asks DeepSeek to pick the five most relevant papers and summarize them in English and Chinese,
5. grabs a teaser figure from each paper’s HTML version,
6. publishes the result to the Robotics Digest section — and emails it to me.

The same inbox (papers@cdtian.com) also receives paper recommendations from other tools via Cloudflare Email Routing, so everything flows through one place.

If you’re curious about any part of the setup, leave a comment below.