For the last six months or so, I’ve been experimenting with a new website on my root domain uncountable.uk to bring together this blog, my diary and my photos all into one place.

My core goal is for it to be a static site, and for everything to be served as fast as possible, including search. It regenerates three times a day and refreshes any new content posted to my blogs.

So far, it’s a fairly boring and standard infinite scroll of stuff. The search is pretty cool though. Remember that there is no server, so those instant results are being generated on your phone. Try going to my home page, click the search icon and type in balsam (something I write about a lot). You’ll see what I mean.

But I really want to be able to surface any content, not just recent articles. So I came up with a random article wall which just shows the titles of everything in no particular order.

A friend of mine said it looked like wrapping paper. I like that analogy, even though they hated the design.

This is the kind of display I want to build more of. I don’t like menus or logos or any of the usual waymarks that people expect on a website. I want people to be challenged by the layout, even to the extent that they don’t know what to do.

We seem to have landed on the “grid and card” approach to displaying summary information, which makes a lot of sites all feel the same. But I don’t think this is necessarily the only engaging way to show people around your site.

So I’ll continue to plug away at different ideas.

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