A new piece of writing, an ongoing project and a useful older resource do not need to compete for the same place in a feed.
That became an organising principle for The Lab. The homepage has three sections with different editorial rules: Notes, Projects and Features.
Recent writing
Notes are chronological. The homepage shows the six newest short pieces as a list of titles.
That is a modest promise: this is where to find recent writing. The list does not have to tell the whole story of the site, and a new Note does not have to be the most important thing in the collection.
A title-only list also gives smaller pieces somewhere to live without requiring each one to justify a large image or elaborate card.
Work that holds together
Projects are selected and ordered deliberately. Their positions do not change simply because one receives an update.
A project is more than a tag applied to several posts. Its page can explain the work, offer a resource and suggest a route through related material. That reading order may differ from publication order: an introduction can remain the best place to begin even after several later Notes exist.
This separates two questions: what happened most recently, and what would help someone understand the project?
Work worth keeping in view
Features have another role. They let a piece stay visible because it deserves a closer look.
A featured item might be recent, but recency is not the reason it occupies that space. It might be a standalone Note or something connected to a project. Changing the feature selection should not change the piece’s date, URL or project relationship.
Keep the distinctions in the implementation
These choices are easy to blur if the site stores them as one list of posts with an assortment of labels.
The current model keeps them separate:
- a content format describes the kind of piece;
- a project relationship records where it belongs;
- dates establish chronology;
- explicit lists determine homepage selection and reading order.
Topics, if they become useful, can describe subject matter without taking over any of those jobs. A small site does not need a filter interface before it has enough material to justify one.
The layout follows these distinctions. Recent Notes occupy a quieter column. Selected Projects have more room. Featured pieces can expand across the page below them.
A homepage is an edited entrance, not a complete inventory. Giving its sections different rules makes it possible to show what is new without letting novelty decide everything.