I redid the home page again. I know, I know — I do this a lot. But this time it's actually simpler, not more complicated.
I tried out a fancier idea first: a colored timeline with a terracotta border marking every post, categories color-coded across the board. Once I saw it built out, it felt busier than useful, more to look at before finding what I actually wanted. So I scrapped it and went with plain lists instead. Cleaner, faster to scan.
The idea behind splitting things out was better grouping. I post movies and TV, books, and quick micros pretty often, so instead of mixing all of it into one long feed, I broke it into sections. Spotlight sits at the top — that one's not new; it's been around a while, just renamed from Featured. Then Recent GeekOuts, then Micros, then Bookshelf, then Reel & Remote, then everything else in a plain list underneath.
Recent GeekOuts is my journal logs on a variety of topics. Micros are my quick notes and thoughts, capped around 300 characters, with their own spot instead of getting buried between longer posts.
Bookshelf works a little differently for now — I don't have any book reviews yet, so it opens with a "Currently Reading" spot at the top, then whatever posts are tagged to that category underneath. Reel & Remote leads with three reviews up top, each one titled so you know what you're looking at before you click in.
One thing I went back and forth on: whether to add categories to the home page at all. I didn't want to lock in which ones show, since what I write about shifts over time, and fixed categories would just freeze that moment instead of reflecting where my writing actually goes. Then it clicked — let the categories re-sort themselves by post count as the blog updates, so whatever I'm writing most just naturally rises to the top. Haven't seen it kick in yet, but fingers crossed it works.
Last thing: I swapped the body font from Inter to Lora. Inter's fine, but Lora reads warmer for longer stretches of text. Small change, but it makes the page feel less like a tech site and more like a blog.
More small tweaks coming everywhere else. There always are.