CLAUDE.md

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

What this is

A personal academic website (Xinnuo Xu) built on the academicpages Jekyll template, itself a fork of the Minimal Mistakes theme. It is served via GitHub Pages from https://xinnuoxu.github.io. There is no application code to compile — content lives in markdown collections and the layout/styling comes from the vendored theme.

Local development

bundle install                      # install Ruby deps (delete Gemfile.lock first if it errors)
bundle exec jekyll liveserve        # build + serve at localhost:4000 with live reload (hawkins gem)
bundle exec jekyll serve            # plain serve, no live reload

_config.dev.yml overrides config for local runs (sets url: localhost:4000, disables analytics). Jekyll’s liveserve/serve does not pick it up automatically — pass it explicitly if needed: bundle exec jekyll serve --config _config.yml,_config.dev.yml.
_config.yml is not hot-reloaded. Restart the server after editing it.
GitHub Pages builds the site automatically on push to master; no manual deploy step.

Content model

Content is Jekyll collections, one directory per type, each file a markdown doc with YAML front matter. Output URLs and default layouts are wired in _config.yml under collections: and defaults:.

_publications/ — papers. Front matter drives _pages/publications.md. See _publications/xu2019unsupervised.md for the expected fields (title, venue, citation, paper_link, doi, collection: publications).
_talks/, _teaching/, _portfolio/ — same pattern, other collections.
_posts/ — blog posts, named YYYY-MM-DD-title.md.
_pages/ — standalone pages (about, cv, 404, archive views). The .html files here (e.g. publications.html, archive views) are list/index templates that loop over collections.
_drafts/ — unpublished drafts.

Filenames in publications/talks conventionally encode the citation key / date (e.g. xu2019unsupervised.md, 2014-03-01-talk-3.md).

_data/navigation.yml — the top menu. Most links are commented out; only Publications and CV are active. Uncomment entries here to expose a collection in the nav.
_config.yml — site-wide settings: author profile/sidebar (author:), social links, analytics, collection definitions, and per-collection defaults (layout, author_profile, share, comments). Edit author: to change the sidebar bio/links.
_data/ui-text.yml, _data/authors.yml — theme UI strings and multi-author metadata.

Theme internals (rarely edited)

_layouts/ — page templates (single.html, talk.html, archive.html, etc.). Front matter layout: selects one.
_includes/ — partials composing the layouts.
_sass/ + assets/css/ — styles. JS lives in assets/js/; rebuild the bundle with npm run build:js (uglifies into assets/js/main.min.js). Node is only needed for this.

Bulk-generating content from spreadsheets

markdown_generator/ converts TSV files into collection markdown. Run the python scripts (or the equivalent .ipynb notebooks) from inside that directory:

cd markdown_generator
python publications.py    # reads publications.tsv -> writes ../_publications/*.md
python talks.py           # reads talks.tsv        -> writes ../_talks/*.md

pubsFromBib.py generates publication markdown from a BibTeX file instead of TSV.

Talk map

talkmap.py / talkmap.ipynb geocode talk locations and build an interactive map into talkmap/, surfaced by _pages/talkmap.html. The talk map nav link is gated by talkmap_link in _config.yml (currently false).

Notes

_site/, vendor/, and .bundle are git-ignored build/dependency output — do not edit or commit them.
If a security/dependency warning appears, the template’s guidance is to delete Gemfile.lock and reinstall.

Xinnuo Xu