Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #113, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.
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On Tuesday, I marked my long-running (nine-month-long) task of building my website on Astro. Most of my site was ready since a long time. I was able to have all the different categories of notes I wanted to have. I had a mostly automated workflow to get a note in my vault to the GitHub repo that has all the code it needs to deploy my site. Some things, namely the about and the colophon pages, were still left to be done. But I was happy with where I was.
The one thing I wanted to build was a unified feed for my home page. I had tried many different layouts in the past. One inspired by Maggie’s site, with a 2x2 grid, which never really went anywhere. I had settled on separate Garden and Stream areas on my website, along with a featured section, partly inspired by Craig Mod’s home page.
But I was not happy. I wanted a unified feed. Something that worked and moulded around the different ways of representing what a garden note was, and what a stream post was.
I had done some work on it, but the results with Sonnet 4.5, then 5 were abysmal. I had planned on using Superpowers to have a better output - which did not really work.
Then, on Tuesday, I wrote about Robin Sloan’s experience using Fable and around the same time Fable came back and Anthropic told me, hey, you have cheaper access to the model till 7th July. So, I thought, let’s let Fable handle this.
The prompt I gave it was this -
Help me redesign my homepage. Broadly speaking there will be two main sections - 1. Landing which will have my latest book + about me and subscribe section. And below that 2. The content section - this is where I need you to think and tell me how we could build this.
Ideally I want to build a recent feed here - a chronological feed of everything that goes on my site. There are broadly three different types of posts on the blog - garden, stream and nordletter. The challenge is coming up with a UI that merges all three types in one coherent view on the home page.
What do you think? What could I build?
A part of the response it gave me was this -
The core problem with merging garden, stream, and nordletter is that the three types have wildly different “natural sizes”: a micro post is its content, a nordletter is a big visual artifact with an edition number, and a garden note is a title that keeps growing. Forcing them into identical cards flattens what makes each type distinct; letting each render freely makes the page chaotic.
The pattern that solves this is a shared skeleton with variable bodies. Every entry gets the same spine — a timeline rail with a colored dot, a small uppercase type label, a date — and below that, each type renders the way it wants to:
Along with the response, it gave me a web artifact which mocked how the UI would look. I absolutely loved it. We went back and forth on it about a few things and then I marked my task done.
Over the next few days, I found myself using Fable to close a bunch of tasks I had thought too cumbersome to build. Like,
- A way to post micro notes to the site, built in the site
- A way to post photos to my site, again, built in the site
- A way to sync my TIL posts without using GitHub directly
- A photo page which looked nice and would syndicate to Instagram
- An updated backlinks component that looks better and includes a snippet of the original note
- I also asked Fable to audit the site and find me ways to improve it. It gave me around seven categories of things I could do - from critical bugs to UI updates.
All that to say, I wonder if this is how inequality will show up in this world going forward. People with money and resources will have a different view of the capability of these models.
I was perfectly happy with Sonnet. It is great for everyday tasks. I never used Opus though. It ate through whatever limits I had very quickly. Maybe, Opus could have redesigned the webpages as well as Fable eventually did. I don’t know.
The age of subsidies is over though. What that means for us going forward remains to be seen.
The other thing I have to do now is help Prerna build her own website. Fable is available till 12th July, so not that much time remains. It should be a simple enough task to do though. Prerna does not have that many asks of the model. I think TIL and Blog are the two categories she would want. And Sonnet is good for the smaller tasks.
On Sunday, we just walked around Helsinki. Here are some pictures.
We had gone to the Brahmakumari centre in Helsinki for a meditative session. I left after a little while as Savya did not enjoy being there as much as us. I left the building and started walking toward the library.
There was a marriage (I think) happening at the Old Church. Some people were decorating up a nice convertible.
Next up, at the library, they had set up a fan zone, I presume for the World Cup.
I went around Toolo lake next. There was some sort of summer grilling/party going on.
After lunch, we decided to walk toward the Crown Bridge. It was my second time here. And this whole series of three bridges, this whole walkway is so damn beautiful.
If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄
Until next week.
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