Notes

A pattern I’ve noticed is what feels like pages within pages. These seemingly contain a large amount of information expanding upon a section within a page.

I first noticed it with Apple products. The example here builds upon the processor section in more detail.

My initial impressions is it’s a bit of an app crossover to retain context within the initial page. You can browse a page, expand the detail, return back to where you were.

There’s been two “high-profile” examples recently from Stripe and Linear which do similarly.

Pages are striving to be succinct as possible because of attention spans and reality. But there’s always the nagging feeling of “I’m not representing this feature as to its full extent as it is”. And using this design pattern to expand on things is how it comes to be. I know I’ve relied on this in more sales focused journeys not wanting to overwhelm the customers.

But this as a pattern feels like it’s inspired by Notion and similar apps. You pop in and out of content rows, edit a bit, return to your database. Pages within pages in Notion feel a seamless pattern whether that is a popover or navigating through.

I do agree with the sentiment it probably should be a page. However, the behaviour on the web isn’t standardised and there is such an unpredictability in some interactions that it probably doesn’t matter? Who knows whether you’ll go to a new page, open a new window or open a modal. Not that I agree with that, but it’s the reality.

To add to this as well, we have good support for View Transitions and that is blurring the lines between what is and isn’t a page change.

I’ve had this website quite a while in a flat file system now. But there’s always a bit of friction when publishing something. As you have to write in a file, commit and push.

It’s not big a deal, but depending on your setup you may have different quantities of frontmatter to contend with.

However, a CMS isn’t all that better. You still have much of the faff, but it looks a bit different. And with a CMS I’ve not seen one replicate the niceties of writing in iA Writer. Be it on a computer or phone.

In effect not much changes. Some of the tedious publishing workflow remains with file based but with better version control.

However, one thing I’ve discovered with Claude Code is automating that process with GitHub Actions.

It’s not particularly easy when some things for your website are bespoke. But chucking AI at it makes it easy.

With my publishing workflow I’ve managed to be able to create an action. I create a new note in the correct folder in my repo I can push this up to GitHub the action will run. Add necessary frontmatter, slugify the file name if needs be and publish for me.

In theory this is the least friction to writing I’ve found. The remaining tedium is committing it to git, making sure I’m on a branch then opening a pull request.

It should make publishing from my phone easier. This note is an attempt to test this.

Traffic has been in steady decline on this website. It’s easy to see why the content isn’t fresh and I don’t post frequently enough. Something feels different though.

There is the effect of AI now, that’s driving how we consume things, share things, put in the effort to learn or do things. I’ve certainly noticed the change in how I browse for solutions.

Combined with Googling being worse, which isn’t a revelation. It’s encouraged the worst in how to create a website. And that has swayed my opinion on how we’re going to find things.

This combined with seeing things around making your website easier to access for LLM’s in markdown feels like the next wave of “SEO”.

There’s nothing to gain or lose from this, as everything is available to the public on Github. Anyway, I’ve written this to say: articles on this website can be viewed in Markdown by adding .md to the end of a URL.

It’s been on my mind for a little while if it’s worth just having an open stream of consciousness to ‘blog’. I’ve liked what Chris Coyier, Dave Rupert and Louie Mantia do in the sense they post what they want and share their interests. Then there’s what Maggie Appleton and Chris Ferdinandi have with the digital garden.

Building a more evergreen website

I’ve been thinking of expanding in different areas of this website since redesigning back in 2024.

The direction is set around web design craft and seeing the digital garden approach this has allowed me to shift my mindset a bit. I can still do this by having the “/blog”, as I see this as the reason people visit or articles are indexed. But I want to allow myself more freedom with notes.

Expanding beyond blog posts

I want to build out different areas, I have an idea for a “letterforms” section, or rather a more typography focused section. I’d like to use this as a way to explore typography, through pairings and anatomical features.

Type design trends come and go also, but this will be a growing collection. It’ll be “typewolf-esque”, but I want to add my own spin.

My own “gallery” and “collectibles”

I’d like to use this notes section to post design practice, which can fuel ideas for blog posts or to build out a “patterns” section.

I want it to almost be a place where I collect things and be kind of fun. I started this with Collections for a link library. I intend to build upon this further as I’ve been prototyping some ideas.

Let’s see where I go with this.