Ash Zhang's Blog

Site

Live site

The Ashmartisan business site at the root, and my personal blog (thoughts and notes from exploring broad areas) under /blog/.

This site started on VuePress and now runs on an Astro-first architecture. Markdown content in blog/_posts and blog/_notes remains the source of truth, while src/ contains the active site shell, structured data, and interactive islands.

Site Structure

One Astro build serves two sites on the same domain:

Path	What	Code
/, /privacy/	Ashmartisan business site (English), built around the Interactive Equipment Explainer	src/studio/ (copy in src/studio/i18n/en.ts; zh.ts is an unpublished translation), assets in public/studio/
/blog/…	Personal blog, portfolio and CV	src/pages/blog/, src/components/, src/layouts/BaseLayout.astro

The two sites share nothing but src/lib/paths.ts; each layout imports its own stylesheet, so their CSS never mixes. The business site deliberately does not link to the blog; the blog is reachable at /blog/ and links back to the root. The blog moved from the root to /blog/: scripts/postbuild.mjs writes a redirect at every pre-move address (/post/…, /notes/…, /tag/…, /portfolio/…, /cv/, /tool/).

Ashmartisan wiring comes from optional PUBLIC_* variables (see .env.example; in CI set them as repository variables): PUBLIC_DEMO_URL (overrides the explainer address; defaults to its Vercel deployment), PUBLIC_FORM_ENDPOINT (overrides the Formspree form), PUBLIC_ANALYTICS_DOMAIN.

The product renders in public/studio/shots/ are frames captured from the explainer's canvas, one per device and view (<id>.webp, <id>-xray.webp, …). Model credits are in src/studio/data/devices.ts.

Local Development

nvm use
yarn install
yarn dev
yarn check
yarn build

GitHub Pages Deployment

The repository now includes a GitHub Actions workflow that builds the Astro site from this source repository and pushes the generated dist/ output to a separate GitHub Pages repository.

Current default target:

• source repo: zblcool/myBlog
• deploy repo: zblcool/zblcool.github.io
• deploy branch: master

Required setup

1. Generate an SSH key pair for deployment.
2. Add the public key as a deploy key with write access on the target Pages repository.
3. Add the private key to this source repository as a secret named PAGES_DEPLOY_KEY.

PAGES_DEPLOY_KEY can be either:

• the raw private key content
• a base64-encoded copy of the private key content

Optional:

• PAGES_DEPLOY_KEY_PASSPHRASE if the private key is encrypted with a passphrase

Do not store the public key in this secret. If GitHub Actions reports error in libcrypto, the secret content is usually malformed or newline-normalized incorrectly.

Optional repository variables

• TARGET_PAGES_REPOSITORY
• TARGET_PAGES_BRANCH
• SITE_URL
• BASE_PATH
• CNAME_DOMAIN

Examples:

• Deploy to zblcool/zblcool.github.io as the root site: leave BASE_PATH empty or set it to /.
• Deploy to a project Pages repo: set SITE_URL and BASE_PATH to match the final public URL.
• Use a custom domain: set SITE_URL to the public origin and CNAME_DOMAIN to the hostname.

If TARGET_PAGES_REPOSITORY is not set, the workflow defaults to zblcool/zblcool.github.io. If TARGET_PAGES_BRANCH is not set, the workflow defaults to master.

URL Compatibility

The Astro build writes legacy redirect files for old GitHub Pages tag URLs such as:

• /tag/Computer%20Graphics/
• /tag/C++/
• /tag/C%23/
• /notes/page/2/

These redirects help old bookmarks and indexed URLs survive the architecture transition.