Website feedback — rya-sge.github.io

Review of the site content and configuration as of 2026-09-29, based on the repository sources (the site was not built locally). Items are ordered by priority within each section and identified by section number and letter (e.g. 1.a).

Status legend: ✅ Done · 🟡 Partially done · ⬜ Open

Progress: 34 done, 3 partially done, 13 open.

1. High priority — visible on every page

• 1.a ✅ Site title is still the template placeholder. _config.yml:12 had title: "Your Name / Site Title", shown in the header on every page and in every browser tab / search result.
  • Done: set to "Ryan S.".
• 1.b ✅ Site name and description are placeholders. _config.yml:14-15 had name: "Your Name" and description: "Your Name's academic portfolio", used in the footer, the meta description and social previews.
  • Done: name: "Ryan S."; description: "Security engineer and blockchain developer: CMTAT, tokenization, cross-chain and smart contract security" (also reused as og_description).
• 1.c ✅ Repository URL is wrong. _config.yml:19 was https://github.com/rya-sge.github.io, which is not a valid repo.
  • Done: set to rya-sge/rya-sge.github.io (the owner/name form expected by the GitHub Pages metadata plugin, matching the git remote).
• 1.d ✅ No social preview image. og_image and teaser were empty, so links shared on LinkedIn/X had no picture.
  • Done: og_image: "favicon.jpg" (same picture as profile.png, which is actually a JPEG with a .png extension), twitter.username: "ADCDIII" (required for X card tags), and _includes/seo.html now emits an og:image tag and absolute image URLs.
  • Still open: the image is a 400×400 square, so previews show a small thumbnail; a 1200×630 banner would give the large preview.
• 1.e ✅ Web manifest still names the template icon. images/manifest.json had "name": "OOjs UI icon academic-progressive", and _includes/head/custom.html had a stale comment about the template favicon source.
  • Done: manifest name and short_name set to "Ryan S."; stale comment removed.

2. CV page (_pages/cv.md)

• 2.a ✅ Leftover template text: “Service and leadership — Currently signed in to 43 different slack teams” (cv.md:99-101). Remove the section or replace it (e.g. Y-CTF co-founder, conference talks).
  • Done: “Service and leadership” section removed (Y-CTF is already listed under Education).
• 2.b ✅ Empty “Publications” section. It loops over site.publications, but _publications is not declared as a collection in _config.yml, and the files in it are template placeholders (“Paper Title Number 1…”). The heading therefore renders with nothing under it. Either list the Taurus articles directly (as in publications.md) or remove the section.
  • Done: the site.publications loop replaced by a link to /publications/.
• 2.c ✅ Empty “Teaching” section. site.teaching does not exist; remove the section.
  • Done: section removed.
• 2.d 🟡 Skills section is thin and oddly structured: “Solana” sits outside “Smart contract development”, and there is nothing on security (audits, pentest, cryptography), tooling (Foundry, Hardhat, Slither, Aderyn) or other chains you present in talks (Tezos, Aztec, Zama FHE, Stellar/Soroban…). This is the section recruiters scan first.
  • Done: skills regrouped into smart contract development (Solidity with Foundry/Hardhat/Truffle, SmartPy, Move, Solana), tokenization and standards, cross-chain and integrations, privacy (Zama FHEVM, Self zero-knowledge identity), security (analysis, pentest, cryptography, Y-CTF) and other languages.
  • Still open: Slither, Aderyn, Aztec and Stellar/Soroban were not added as skills, because nothing in the repository shows hands-on work with them; add them if they apply.
• 2.e ✅ Work experience summary is outdated relative to your talks. The Taurus entry does not mention privacy work (CMTAT-Confidential with FHE, Aztec), the CMTAT audit process, or conference speaking (EthCC, BSA EPFL, Black Alps, CMTA x OpenZeppelin).
  • Done: the Taurus summary now covers the CMTAT security process (audits, static analysis, AI audit tools), partner integrations (Chainlink ACE and CCIP, LayerZero, FIX with Nethermind), privacy (CMTAT-Confidential with Zama FHE, the Aztec version) and conference speaking with a link to /talks/; CMTAT-Confidential, CMTAT-ACE, CMTAT-FIX, CMTAT-LayerZero and Smart Wallet 7702 were added to the public projects.
• 2.f ✅ Typos / consistency: “Analyze of smart contracts”, lowercase “position:” / “company:”, “Duration:” lines duplicating the dates in the headings, “A rust-based application to store password securely”.
  • Done: “Analysis of smart contracts”, “SmartPy (Tezos)”, “Company:” / “Position:” capitalised, duplicate “Duration:” lines removed (Taurus heading now reads “12/2022 - present”), “Rust-based application to store passwords securely”.
• 2.g ⬜ Consider a downloadable PDF CV in files/ linked at the top of the page.

3. Home page (_pages/about.md)

• 3.a ✅ “Main article” section had an orphan sentence: “Here my main articles on Blockchain:” was followed by nothing.
  • Done: sentence and extra blank lines removed; heading renamed “Main articles”.
• 3.b ✅ Duplicated content: the article lists are copied from publications.md but are already out of date (the 2025 Taurus articles on conditional transfers and ERC-1400 are missing). Keep one source of truth: a short “highlights” list on the home page and link to /publications/.
  • Done: the copied lists replaced by a short “Selected articles” list (the two 2025 Taurus articles, the CCIP/USDC article and MetaMask Secrets) with a link to /publications/, which stays the single full list.
• 3.c ✅ No mention of talks.
  • Done: new “Talks” section with EthCC 2026 and Black Alps 2024 (talk page, video and slides links) and a link to /talks/.
• 3.d ✅ Inconsistent LinkedIn handle: about.md linked to /in/ryan-sauge, while the sidebar used ryan-sge.
  • Done: both now use ryan-sge (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-sge); an earlier fix had wrongly switched them to rya-sge, which is not a LinkedIn profile.
• 3.e ✅ Tone: “I hope you can find your happiness among this content” reads oddly; something like “Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or X” is enough. The first line has a leading space (“ Hi there 👋”).
  • Done: contact sentence now reads “Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or X.”; leading space removed.
• 3.f ✅ Twitter/X naming: the page said “twitter account” and mixed twitter.com and x.com links.
  • Done: home page says “an X account” and links to x.com/ADCDIII; the sidebar link in _includes/author-profile.html now points to x.com.
• 3.g ✅ Tab title showed “Blockchain - Smart Contract - Security - Your Name / Site Title”.
  • Done: resolved by 1.a; now “Blockchain - Smart Contract - Security - Ryan S.”.

4. Publications page (_pages/publications.md)

• 4.a ✅ “Token Transfer Management … ERC-1404” has (ERC-1404) where the year should be (publications.md:23).
  • Done: year set to 2024.
• 4.b ⬜ Talks and slide decks are publications too; add a short “Talks” section linking to /talks/ or list the four decks.
• 4.c ⬜ The personal blog section only lists five articles; if some newer ones (e.g. the Bitcoin keys, MPC and Winternitz OTS posts linked from the Black Alps talk page) matter, add them.
• 4.d ✅ The page title “Publications” with a section “My main personal articles” — consider renaming the nav item to “Articles” since there are no academic papers.
  • Decided: the name “Publications” is kept, because “Articles” next to the “Blog Posts” menu item (which links to Access Denied) read as two names for the same thing. The page stays at /publications/; /articles/ redirects there in case that address was shared.

5. Portfolio page (_pages/portfolio.md)

• 5.a ✅ Heading levels are inconsistent: “Smart contract” uses a level-1 ====== heading with #### projects, while “Rust” uses ## with ### projects.
  • Done: the page now uses ## for the five sections (CMTA, Taurus, Hackathons, HEIG-VD, Personal) and ### for every project.
• 5.b ✅ CCIP Sender and IncomeVault have identical durations (12/2023 — 05/2024); check that this is right.
  • Done: confirmed, both run from 12/2023 to 05/2024 (IncomeVault had been changed to 08/2024 from LinkedIn and is set back to 05/2024).
• 5.c ⬜ IncomeVault skills list “Stablecoin” although it is about dividends/coupons; “Tokenization · Corporate actions” would fit better. “build with CMTAT” → “built with CMTAT”; “Publish a blog post” → “Published a blog post”.
• 5.d 🟡 Missing recent projects you present in talks: CMTAT-Confidential (FHE / ERC-7984), CMTAT cross-chain, Aztec version, and the TERC-20 / TERC-721 / TERC-1155A repos listed in the CV.
  • Done: CMTAT Confidential, CMTAT LayerZero, TERC-20 and TERC-721 were added earlier; CMTAT CCIP (CMTAT bridged with Chainlink CCIP, rya-sge/CMTAT-CCIP) and TERC-1155A added now.
  • Still open: the Aztec version of CMTAT is not listed, because nothing in the repository shows what role you had in it.
• 5.e ✅ “Skills: cryptography security” → “Rust · Cryptography · Security”.
  • Done: both Rust projects (Password manager, 2FA with YubiKey) now use “Rust · Cryptography · Security”.

6. Talks

• 6.a ⬜ Talk pages do not show venue and location. _layouts/talk.html:38 only prints the “Talk at venue, location” line when page.talk_type is set, but all talk files use type. Either add talk_type: "Talk" to each file or change the layout to test page.type.
• 6.b ⬜ _config.yml has talkmap_link: false and the talkmap notebook is absent, but .github/workflows/scrape_talks.yml still runs on every change to _talks/ and will fail (it executes talkmap.ipynb). Delete the workflow or add the notebook.
• 6.c ✅ The Black Alps talk page uses \- escaped dashes and two lnkd.in short links; replace these with normal bullet lists and the full blog URLs (short links hide the destination and can expire). A stray line break splits the Trezor URL (_talks/2024-11-07-crypto-wallet.md).
  • Done: related posts rewritten as bullet lists with the post titles as links; the two lnkd.in links replaced by the full blog URLs (Winternitz OTS, EIP-6780), both checked to load; the split Trezor URL fixed.
• 6.d ⬜ Consider adding a thumbnail (header.teaser) per talk for a nicer Talks page.
• 6.e ⬜ The EthCC 2026 location (“Cannes, France”) was not taken from a source in the repo; confirm it.

7. Template leftovers still published

• 7.a ✅ _pages/markdown.md → /markdown/ (template’s Markdown guide).
• 7.b ✅ _pages/archive-layout-with-content.md → /archive-layout-with-content/ (theme demo).
• 7.c ✅ _pages/non-menu-page.md → /non-menu-page/ (“This is a page not in the menu”).
  • Done for 7.a–7.c and the post in 7.d: sitemap: false in front matter, so they are excluded from sitemap.xml and from the HTML /sitemap/ page, and _includes/seo.html adds <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> for such pages.
  • Done: all three pages deleted.
• 7.d ✅ _posts/2025-11-12-blog-post-1.md → “Blog Post number 1” tagged “cool posts” (now hidden from sitemaps, see above). The “Blog Posts” nav item still leads to a year archive containing only this post. Replace the nav item with a direct link to https://rya-sge.github.io/access-denied/, and delete the post.
  • Done: post deleted; “Blog Posts” in the header now links to https://rya-sge.github.io/access-denied/.
• 7.e ✅ _publications/ — five placeholder papers (“Paper Title Number 1…”).
  • Done: folder deleted.
• 7.f ✅ _data/authors.yml — “Name Name” / “Name2 Name2” placeholders.
  • Done: file deleted (the includes that read it already handle its absence).
• 7.g ✅ markdown_generator/ — template scripts with placeholder TSVs; not needed if you write talks by hand.
  • Done: folder deleted.
• 7.h ✅ files/paper1.pdf, files/slides1.pdf, files/bibtex1.bib — template sample files, publicly downloadable. The two PDFs are now excluded from sitemap.xml via _config.yml defaults, but still published; delete them.
  • Done: the three files deleted, and their sitemap: false defaults removed from _config.yml.
• 7.i ⬜ images/500x300.png, bio-photo.jpg, bio-photo-2.jpg, editing-talk.png — template images.
• 7.j ⬜ README.md — still the Academic Pages template README; a short personal README would help visitors of the GitHub repo.

8. Privacy / terms page (_pages/terms.md)

• 8.a ✅ It claims the site uses Disqus comments, Google Analytics and third-party advertisers, none of which are configured. The page is dated 2016. Either rewrite it to reflect reality (GitHub Pages hosting; GitHub logs IPs; no cookies or analytics) or remove it.
  • Done: rewritten — Disqus, Google Analytics and third-party advertisers removed; the page now describes GitHub Pages hosting, the scripts loaded from cdnjs and jsDelivr, and the theme choice kept in local storage (no cookies).
• 8.b ✅ Related: _config.yml defaults set comments: true for posts with no comment provider configured — harmless, but can be set to false.
  • Done: set to false.

9. Technical / SEO

• 9.a 🟡 _includes/footer/custom.html loads MathJax, Plotly (several MB) and Mermaid on every page, although no page uses them. Removing them speeds up every page load, and removes the polyfill script, which is unnecessary for modern browsers (fewer third-party scripts is also a better look on a security engineer’s site).
  • Done: the polyfill script (cdnjs.cloudflare.com/polyfill/v3/polyfill.min.js) removed; MathJax 3 does not need it. This is Cloudflare’s mirror, not the compromised polyfill.io domain, so visitors were not exposed.
  • Still open: MathJax, Plotly and Mermaid are still loaded on every page.
• 9.b ⬜ publication_category in _config.yml (Books / Journal Articles / Conference Papers) is unused.
• 9.c ✅ The large academic-profile block in _config.yml (arxiv, pubmed, scopus…) is empty and can be trimmed for readability.
  • Done: all empty fields removed from the author block (academic, repository and social profiles); the comment above it points to _includes/author-profile.html for the full list of supported fields.
• 9.d ⬜ Check that bluesky: "ad403" is the right handle (other handles are AccessDenied404 / ADCDIII).
• 9.e ⬜ Slide PDFs: 2024-blackalps-crypto-wallet.pdf is 6.6 MB; compressing it would make it faster to open on mobile.

10. Suggested next quick wins

1. ✅ Remove “43 slack teams” and the empty Teaching and Publications sections from the CV (2.a–2.c).
2. Add talk_type to talks or fix the layout so venue/location appear (6.a).
3. ✅ Delete the template pages, placeholder post, _publications/ and sample files; point “Blog Posts” to Access Denied (7.a–7.h).
4. Rewrite or remove the Terms page; drop unused MathJax/Plotly/Mermaid scripts (8.a, 9.a).