academicpages/academicpages.github.io — reverse-engineered prompt

Build me a polished personal academic website that I can publish on GitHub Pages. It should feel like a simple portfolio for a researcher or professor, with a home page, about section, publications, talks, teaching, portfolio projects, blog posts, and a place to upload CVs or PDFs. I want the content to be easy to edit in Markdown, with sample entries already included so I can replace them with my own information later.

Please set up the site so it has a clean light theme, navigation, profile photo area, social links, and sensible defaults in the configuration file. Make sure it can run locally for preview and also be ready to publish as username.github.io on GitHub Pages. If there are helper scripts or notebooks for turning publication lists into pages, leave clear examples for those too.

I’m not very technical, so keep the setup simple and add brief instructions in the README. Look up current docs online if needed.