Website Migration: Hugo to Astro
A complete rebuild of ianadamsresearch.com
Today marks a significant milestone for this website: a complete migration from Hugo (with the Academic theme) to Astro, a modern static site generator.
Why the Change?
The original Hugo Academic site served well since 2020, but several factors motivated this migration:
- Maintenance burden: The Academic theme became increasingly complex and difficult to customize
- Modern tooling: Astro offers better support for interactive components (React) while maintaining fast static site performance
- Dashboard needs: The new MPV Dashboard required interactive Plotly.js charts that work better with React islands
- Developer experience: Astro’s file-based routing and component model are more intuitive
What’s New
Interactive Dashboard
The MPV Dashboard now features 19 interactive Plotly.js visualizations analyzing police violence data. Filters for year, race, and state let visitors explore the data dynamically.
News Feeds
Four curated news feeds aggregate research-relevant content:
Modern Stack
- Astro 5.x - Static site generation with island architecture
- React 18 - Interactive components where needed
- Tailwind CSS - Utility-first styling with dark mode support
- Plotly.js - Publication-quality interactive charts
- MDX - Markdown with component support
Preserved Content
All 105 publications were migrated with their metadata intact, pulled from OpenAlex for accurate citation information.
Technical Details
The migration was assisted by Claude (Anthropic’s AI), which helped:
- Design the new site architecture
- Create React dashboard components
- Write data preprocessing scripts
- Debug deployment issues
The site continues to be hosted on Netlify with automatic deployments from GitHub.
Looking Forward
This new foundation makes it easier to add features like:
- More interactive data visualizations
- Enhanced publication filtering
- Additional research tools
The source code remains open for anyone interested in the implementation.
This post serves as a historical marker for the January 2026 migration from Hugo to Astro.