Lorenzo Fabbri - Personal Website

My personal academic website built with Quarto and R. The site includes my research, publications, talks, CV, blog posts, and a "Now" page.

Live site: https://lorenzofabbri.github.io/epilorenzo

Building Locally

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/lorenzoFabbri/epilorenzo.git
   cd epilorenzo

2. Restore R packages with renv:

   R -e "renv::restore()"

3. Render the website:

   quarto render

4. Preview locally:

   quarto preview

The website is built into the docs/ directory and served via GitHub Pages.

Publication Management

Publications are managed via publications.yml. New journal articles are automatically discovered from ORCID weekly (via the orcidtr R package), and publication pages are generated using a Python script that fetches metadata from CrossRef (primary) or DOI content negotiation / DataCite (fallback).

When new papers are found, a GitHub Issue is opened listing them so you can add categories and links.

Directory structure

• research/articles/ — Published journal articles and conference papers
• research/posters/ — Conference posters
• research/working-papers/ — Preprints and works in progress (managed manually)

Automatic discovery (CI)

On the first Monday of every month at 08:00 UTC, a GitHub Actions workflow:

1. Queries ORCID for new journal-article works (via scripts/discover_publications.R)
2. Appends any new DOIs to publications.yml with empty categories
3. Generates/updates all publication pages (via scripts/generate_publications.py)
4. Commits changes and opens a GitHub Issue if new papers were added
5. Triggers the website deployment workflow automatically once complete

Manual usage

# Discover new ORCID articles locally
Rscript scripts/discover_publications.R

# Generate pages from publications.yml
python scripts/generate_publications.py

# Preview without writing files
python scripts/generate_publications.py --dry-run

Adding a publication manually

Add an entry to publications.yml under articles or posters:

articles:
  - doi: 10.xxxx/xxxxx
    slug: fabbri2024title          # optional, auto-generated if omitted
    categories:
      - Epidemiology
    github: https://github.com/lorenzoFabbri/my-paper
    extra_links:
      - name: Preprint
        url: https://...
        icon: fa-solid fa-file-pdf

Then run the generation script:

python scripts/generate_publications.py

The page will be written to research/articles/{slug}/index.qmd and appear automatically on the Research page.

Talks

Talks are listed in talks/talks_2025.yml and rendered via a custom EJS template. Add new entries directly to the YAML file; the page at talks.qmd reads from it automatically.

Writing Blog Posts

1. Create a folder under posts/:

   mkdir -p posts/my-new-post

2. Create index.qmd with frontmatter:

   ---
   title: "My Post Title"
   description: "Short description"
   author: "Lorenzo Fabbri"
   date: "2025-01-15"
   categories: [research, methods]
   ---

3. Write content in markdown/Quarto and render:

   quarto render

Deployment

The website automatically deploys to GitHub Pages after the Update Publication Pages workflow completes (i.e., once a month on the first Monday). It can also be triggered manually via workflow_dispatch. Make sure:

1. GitHub Pages is enabled in repository settings
2. Source is set to "GitHub Actions"
3. The workflow has proper permissions

Hardcover Integration

The "Now" page fetches currently-reading books from Hardcover via the scripts/hardcover.R script.

Setup:

1. Get your API token from https://hardcover.app/account/api

2. Create _hardcover_config.R with your credentials (see .gitignore — this file is not tracked):

   HARDCOVER_API_TOKEN <- "your-token-here"
   HARDCOVER_USER_ID <- "your-user-id"

License

Content © 2026 Lorenzo Fabbri. Code is MIT licensed.