Simon Willison’s Weblog

A homepage redesign for my blog’s 22nd birthday

12th June 2024

This blog is 22 years old today! I wrote up a whole bunch of higlights for the 20th birthday a couple of years ago. Today I’m celebrating with something a bit smaller: I finally redesigned the homepage.

I publish three kinds of content on my blog: entries (like this one), "blogmarks" (aka annotated links) and quotations. Until recently the entries were the main feature on the (desktop) homepage, with blogmarks and quotations relegated to the sidebar.

Back in April I implemented Markdown support for my blogmarks, allowing me to include additional links and quotations in the body of those descriptions.

I was inspired in this by Daring Fireball, which has long published a combination of annotated links combined with longer essay style entries.

It turns out I really like posting longer-form content attached to links! Here’s one from earlier today which rivals my full entries in length.

These were looking pretty cramped in the sidebar:

So I’ve done a small redesign. The right hand column on my homepage now displays entries, quotations and blogmarks as a combined list, reusing the format I already had in place for the tag page.

The right hand column is for “highlights”, aka my longer form blog entries.

The mobile version of my site was already serving content mixed together like this, so this change mainly brings the desktop version in line with the mobile one.

Here’s the issue on GitHub and the commit that implemented the change.