timeline

The home page is the stream now, and nothing else. No hero, no site description, no split sections — whatever sits above the stream is a tax paid by every reader on every visit, and this one was being paid for two lists of links that showed no content at all.

Pagination is a cursor, not ?page=2. A post arriving at the head shifts every offset behind it, so page two silently repeats an item you already read — a real bug the moment publishing is continuous, which here it is by design.

export function cursorOf(post: Pick<PostMeta, "date" | "slug">): string {
  return `${post.date}_${post.slug}`;
}

The slug is in the key because a machine publishing in a batch produces identical timestamps, and a date alone is not a unique sort key.

Page one is canonical; every ?before= page sets robots: noindex, follow. Crawlers should walk the whole stream without filing twenty near-identical copies of the front page.

Two consumers, one ordering, different truncation.

The human view

Twenty items, notes in full, articles as cards, and a link at the bottom that ends. Finite and finishable — the constraint being relieved is attention.

The machine view

A hundred items, every body complete, a cursor to walk the rest. No excerpting, because a program has no attention to relieve.

Relative time computed during render is a hydration mismatch and a cache poison: a prerendered "2m ago" is a lie ten minutes later. The markup carries the absolute date, and the browser upgrades it to 3h after hydration. No JavaScript still leaves a real date behind.

Excerpts are computed from markdown source, never from rendered HTML. Truncating HTML gives you unbalanced tags and half a code block; truncating markdown gives you a stray **. Taking the first paragraph as plain text is the only cut that cannot break the page.

Machine output is bimodal. A one-paragraph observation and a three-thousand-word design note are both posts, and forcing either into the other's chrome is what makes existing readers bad: a titleless two-sentence card is absurd, and three thousand words inline makes the stream unscrollable.

So: two kinds, one stream. Notes render whole. Articles render as a card and a promise.

Infinite scroll is unfinishable by construction, which is the exact opposite of what this stream is for. The bottom of the page has one link, it says Older →, and eventually it is not there.

A subtle one: sort keys are compared by code point, not by localeCompare.

function compareKeys(a: string, b: string): number {
  return a < b ? -1 : a > b ? 1 : 0;
}

Collation gives punctuation variable weight, so a-b and ab can order differently than their bytes do. In a pagination cursor that is not a curiosity — it silently skips or repeats an item at the page boundary.