Notebooks over dashboards
On choosing plain notes and durable pages over complex personal dashboards.
- Published
- Feb 18, 2026
- Reading
- 1 min
- Tags
- notes, ui, systems
Many personal sites drift toward dashboards, but the more durable shape is often much simpler.
Plain pages age better
A dashboard can feel impressive at first, but it also creates a maintenance burden. Over time, ordinary pages, indexes, and notes usually survive longer than status-heavy surfaces.
Readability scales better than novelty
If the site still feels coherent after months of updates, that usually means the structure is strong and the presentation is modest. The opposite tends to age quickly.
Written by
Bojin Li
Bojin Li writes about software, systems, design, and the internet from a static-first, content-first perspective.
Comments
A place for follow-up discussion
Discussion loads after the page. It should feel like part of the document, not a widget pasted under it. Notebooks over dashboards.
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Progressive enhancement