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The Technical Section Got a Real Makeover

Redesigned the /technical page with a repo dashboard and gave the home page variable-density sections — four changes in one session.

2 min readEvergreenlate-nightMiami Beach, FL, USA
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Four changes in one session. They all feed into the same thing: making the blog's Technical section actually useful to browse.

What happened

It started with a simple idea: group the technical posts by which project they're about. Honest CAM, this blog, the second brain project — each one gets its own little section. Before, it was just one long list of posts with no indication of what anything was. The first change wired up that grouping logic and backfilled all 40 existing posts with the right category tag so the grouping would actually work (#45).

The second change went further (#46). Instead of sub-headers in a list, the Technical page now shows a dashboard — a two-column grid of repo panels, each one showing the five most recent posts and a "View all" link. The home page got redesigned at the same time: each section now gets the visual style that fits its content. Essays get big hero images. Notes and Technical get compact rows. Projects get edge-to-edge hero images. The idea came from designer Maggie Appleton's "right plot for each plant" principle: don't force everything into the same container.

Then the bugs. On mobile, the compact rows were overflowing the screen — long post titles ran off the right edge instead of cutting off cleanly. A one-line CSS fix sorted it (#47). The section spacing also felt too loose once the compact panels were in, so that got tightened too.

Last, a small cosmetic thing (#48): each repo panel now has a one-line description under its name. So new visitors can tell what "Honest CAM" is without clicking into it.

Why

The blog is where the second brain's output lives — the public face of the projects. Getting the Technical section into shape means there's a real, organized place to send people who want to follow the work. And honestly, it needed to not look like a junk drawer anymore.


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