“I don’t want to write articles — I want to blog.”

If there was ever a sign that personal sites and blogs are making a comeback, I can’t think anything better than the top-to-bottom redesign of Kottke. After all, Jason’s site is the quentisentail blog or The Blog of Blogs. A lot of thought went into the new look and feel that appears to be nicely optimized for the mobile experience. This is the most content-first designs I’ve seen in a while with very intentional decisions made to create the right feel for readers.

In thinking about how I wanted kottke.org to look and, more importantly, feel going forward, I wanted more social media energy than blog energy — one could also say “more old school blog energy than contemporary blog energy”. Blogs now either look like Substack/Medium or Snow Fall and I didn’t want to pattern kottke.org after either of those things. I don’t want to write articles — I want to blog.

This direction continued on to other choices such as removing the header “so the content starts much higher on the page.” I think my favorite change is with the site navigation that was designed to be clearer for members so as to promote more participation.

kottke.org has always been very much my site…but now it’s just a little bit more our site.

Members are able to leave comments on Kottke posts and I’m glad to see an empahsis on promoting this feature. Airbag was a lot more (way more) interesting when comments were enabled (I turned them off when it was clear that everyone had moved to Twitter for discussion). Blogs without comments still feels weird, feels empty. One of the reasons why I started this site on Ghost was for the built in comments for site members.

Though I haven’t come across many responses to Jason’s redesign, my guess is that the words “minimal” or “minimialism” have popped up a few times. The thing about Jason's design work is that neither of these words adequately describe end result. Especially if you consider other features like the masthead made up of generative art and the emoji based categories (so good!). The new Kottke is fantastic. It's not minimal, it's just enough, and therefore just right.

And I hope that Jason's work inspires more folks to flip the lights on blogs of their own.