New Homepage

When I started this blog, I didn’t even think twice. Since I had a few different post “types” that I was ready to include (articles, notes, tv episodes, and movies), it made sense to me to have the latest entries of each type on the front page of this site, like a magazine. That’s what I did on my previous websites.

But it kept bugging me. I had forgotten that this is, first and foremost, a blog. And the word “chronicle” is right there in the title.

I spent many free hours thinking about this. Finally, I decided to make the front page more like a traditional blog: including all post types in reverse chronological order.

But I also wanted it to look more like a timeline.

The inspiration

When I think of timelines, I think of social media. I borrowed from social media designs when I did the notes section of this blog. But for the main page, I wanted a more obvious metaphor for the timeline concept.

Several years back, there was this fantastic social media app called Path. Their idea was to present all your posts (and those from the limited number of friends you could add to that app) as a timeline. With a solid line running down the left. I loved that idea, similar to what Facebook did when they released their Timeline redesign some years back.

So that’s what I did. Now all the entries in this blog are sorted in reverse chronological order, presented as a timeline, with icons to indicate which type of post it is. Grouped by days because, after all, this is a chronicle. Keeping track of the time is essential to the purpose of this blog.

The future

The current implementation uses pagination to partition the content, but I may experiment with infinite scrolling in future iterations.

I will consider adding more colors to the timeline. Perhaps give each post type its own color.

I also want to include some index to show where the current content is located in the timeline. This needs more thinking and tinkering, but I already have some ideas I want to try.