Ordering the Home Page

How the home page arranges writing and projects. A passing joke about random shuffle became sorting by recency, which carries intent instead of being arbitrary.

When designing a website, how do you decide the order of the home page? What takes lead? The simple decision is a declared opinion about what thing matters most. The choice is something often thought about once in passing and then locked in as "the way it's always been" until someone has a strong enough opinion to change it.

As of time of this writing I have two domains and no strong opinion on what matters more. Writing is something I do for myself, but so are these projects. Neither is the main topic.

As a passing joke I was like "what if I random shuffled the order" as a pun on my handle "Usually Influx". But random ordering is itself a statement, a statement that I don't care about the information I convey. Motion without signal or intent.

On the other hand recency carries intent. Whatever I worked on last is the first thing that surfaces. The order then reflects what I've actually been working on, without me having to pick a ranking.

On the implementation side this is barely anything. A lead_domain function on SiteContent compares max(last_modified_date) across each domain at day-level precision. Whichever moved more recently leads. Same-day ties leave the existing order in place, so a typo fix on the latest essay doesn't suddenly swap which section is up top.

So the home page does change between visits, which is what the handle suggests in the first place. The change just carries intent instead of being arbitrary.