How this section works

This page exists to be deleted. It is the first piece in the Insights section, written to show what an article looks like once it is here — the split hero, the typography, the takeaways box, the link preview a mail client will build from it. Replace it with the first real piece and this one goes away.

Everything below is also true, so it doubles as the short version of the documentation.

What belongs here

Two kinds of thing, and the filter at the top of the overview tells them apart.

Articles are what we write: a point of view, a set of field notes, the argument behind a piece of work. Long enough to be worth a click from an email, short enough that someone finishes it.

Bloom Bites are the newsletter issues themselves, archived. Every issue gets a web version at a permanent address, which gives the mail its "view in browser" link and gives search engines something to index — an issue sent to four hundred inboxes is otherwise invisible the moment it is read.

How a piece gets here

One Markdown file in content/insights/, named after the URL it should have. Its first few lines carry the title, the standfirst, the date, the author and the cover; everything after them is the article.

That file is the whole publishing step. The overview page, this article page, the sidebar, the sitemap, the RSS feed and the link preview are all generated from it when the site builds — there is no second place to update and nothing to remember.

The address is the part that has to be right the first time. Once a link is in someone's inbox, it is there forever.

About the pictures

The cover fills the screen and then holds still: scroll, and the white article rides up over it like a wall closing. Nothing moves the photograph, which is why the effect costs no JavaScript and does not stutter on a phone.

It does ask for a wide file — 2000 pixels across, because full-bleed is the widest surface on the site. When there is no photograph that good, leave the cover out. The hero then takes a generated gradient in one of the brand's four hues, picked from the article's own address so it never changes. No resolution to get wrong, and nothing that looks like a broken image.

What the newsletter links to

Each issue links back to the full pieces at bloom-partners.com/insights/… — our domain, our typography, our analytics. That is the point of hosting them here rather than letting the writing live and die inside an email client.

What comes next

The section is built so the writing can outgrow the current setup without the pages changing. Today an article is a file in the repository. When there are enough of them to want a proper editor, the pages will read from that instead — the same titles, dates and URLs, a different cupboard.