Xiaoxiong Zhang

Xiaoxiong Zhang

M.S. Student in Robotics

CLAUDE.md

CLAUDE.md

This file provides guidance to Claude Code (claude.ai/code) when working with code in this repository.

Overview

This is an academic personal website for Xiaoxiong Zhang, built on the academicpages Jekyll theme (a fork of Minimal Mistakes). It deploys automatically to GitHub Pages at https://Xiaoxiongzzzz.github.io when pushed to master.

Local Development Commands

# Install dependencies (first time or after Gemfile changes)
bundle install

# Serve locally with live reload (recommended for development)
bundle exec jekyll liveserve

# Serve with dev config overrides (disables analytics, uses localhost URL)
bundle exec jekyll serve --config _config.yml,_config.dev.yml

# Clean build artifacts
bundle clean

The site is available at http://localhost:4000. Changes to _config.yml require a server restart; other files hot-reload automatically.

Architecture

The site uses Jekyll’s collections system to organize academic content. Each collection maps to a directory and generates individual pages:

  • _publications/ → /publications/:path/ — Academic papers
  • _talks/ → /talks/:path/ — Conference presentations
  • _portfolio/ → /portfolio/:path/ — Projects
  • _teaching/ → /teaching/:path/ — Teaching entries

Content flow:

  1. Individual collection entries are markdown files with YAML front matter
  2. _pages/ contains top-level pages (homepage at _pages/about.md with permalink: /)
  3. Layouts in _layouts/ use Liquid templates; single is the default for most content, talk for talks
  4. SCSS lives in _sass/ and is compiled via assets/css/main.scss

Key configuration files:

  • _config.yml — Site-wide settings: author profile, collection definitions, plugin list, default front matter per collection
  • _config.dev.yml — Dev overrides (sets url: http://localhost:4000, disables analytics)
  • _data/ui-text.yml — Localization strings for the theme UI
  • _data/authors.yml — Additional author profiles

Adding Content

Publications (_publications/YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md):

---
title: "Paper Title"
collection: publications
permalink: /publication/YYYY-MM-DD-slug
excerpt: 'Short description'
date: YYYY-MM-DD
venue: 'Conference or Journal Name'
paperurl: 'URL to PDF'
citation: 'Full citation string'
---

Talks (_talks/YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md) and other collections follow the same pattern. The markdown_generator/ directory contains Python scripts and Jupyter notebooks to batch-generate collection entries from TSV files.

Important Notes

  • _site/ is the build output directory — do not edit files there directly
  • vendor/ contains bundled Ruby gems — do not modify
  • The homepage content lives in _pages/about.md (not index.html)
  • Images go in images/, downloadable files (PDFs) go in files/
  • _config.yml is not hot-reloaded; restart jekyll serve after changes