Bilingual Essays Design

Goal: Upgrade the Essays section from “Chinese body plus English abstract” into a true bilingual longform writing system, while keeping a single canonical URL per essay and preserving the founder-style site identity.

Product Decision

• Each essay remains a single Markdown file.
• Each essay carries bilingual metadata and bilingual full text.
• The existing site-wide language switch controls what essay title, summary, and body are shown.
• Essays may optionally include an embedded Bilibili player for public talks, lectures, or related recordings.

Content Model

Each essay should support:

• title and title_zh
• subtitle and subtitle_zh
• excerpt and excerpt_zh
• tags
• featured
• optional bilibili_embed
• bilingual body blocks rendered through the site language toggle

UX Rules

• /essays/ should show English-facing metadata in English mode and Chinese-facing metadata in Chinese mode.
• Homepage highlights should also switch with the global language toggle.
• Single essay pages should show the full English body in English mode and the full Chinese body in Chinese mode.
• When a Bilibili embed exists, it should appear in a clean media block below the essay header and above the body.

Scope

This round includes:

• bilingual metadata and rendering across homepage, essays index, and essay pages
• optional Bilibili iframe support
• conversion of the seed essay into bilingual full text

This round does not include:

• standalone talks or videos index
• automated syncing from Bilibili
• comments
• search or tag landing pages