Logbook 2026-11-02

Today the site got a Feed.

The day started with catching up. The logbook of this project arrived on the site: eight entries, from 10 October to yesterday, with their images and loops. Two issues joined the list for later: a space to present the design system, from its principles to its components, and an article on how the visual direction of the site was made.

Then the Feed. The idea had been waiting since the end of October: one page where everything I publish shows up as it comes, a journal entry, a quote, a new note, what I’m focused on. I asked for it in the style of mobile social networks, and of the conversational interface sketched earlier on the design canvas: simple and functional, with a few decorative touches.

What came back already looked like a profile. A cover drawn from the cell landscape, the 2 × 2 avatar, a Follow button that gives the address of an RSS feed, 12 weeks of activity drawn in cells, and a “Working on” line where the mascot is building something. Posts carry a relative date and a “new” badge since your last visit, and the day stays pinned at the top as you scroll.

Then came the corrections. The topic filters became quiet tabs by section of the site: Notes, Work, Lab. Topics and projects will come back later, as advanced filters. The Now left the timeline: only the current one shows, on top, under “Currently”. Quotes became a new kind of note, listed in Notes too, which got the same tabs over a single list. And a small “On this day” will bring back, a year from now, what I published on the same day. I set two ideas aside: threads linking the entries of a logbook, too busy, and generated images for posts without one, since articles and explorations will get their own anyway.

By the evening the Feed had its place in the navigation and a preview on the landing page, and the pieces it shares with the rest of the site had become components.

What struck me most was the speed, and the precision that came with it. With the foundations of the design system in place, the tokens, the cells, the mono labels, the mascot, each new idea was put together from pieces that already existed. The first version was already close to what I had in mind, and most of my feedback was about details: a separator, a spacing, the mascot passing over a label. Building the Feed was a pure pleasure.

Generating has become very fast. What still takes time is everything around it: planning the work, putting each idea into precise words, and above all reviewing what comes back. That part asks for time, attention and care.

The first quote I posted in the Feed puts it well, in Simon Willison’s words: “It doesn’t get easier, you just get faster.”