Welcome to FIVE STARS 2.0!
@zntfdr
The first FIVE STARS overhaul is here!
Since relaunching the website back in 2019, FIVE STARS went on with small iterations here and there, in the meanwhile, the content has outgrown the simple jekyll template that was being used.
Instead of continuing iterating, I took this opportunity to rewrite the whole website from the ground up with Publish: let's have a look at what's new!
Home page
The first challenge I wanted to tackle was articles navigation: the homepage has been completely redesigned and now comes with a What's New section, highlighting the latest six articles, followed by the five most popular categories, each showcasing their own most recent articles.
All sections come with a Browse all button, which filters and highlights all articles for said category.
Article page
The focus has always been the content, which now takes even more screen estate than before.
Every article displays its categories right under the title, making it clear from the start what the article is about.
These categories also function as buttons/filters: tapping on any of them will show all articles under that category.
Continuing with navigation enhancements, all articles come with a Related articles section at the bottom of their page, these articles are hand-picked and feature both older and newer articles, letting the reader go deeper into the topic covered in the main article.
After this section we have even more recommended articles, all from the same category (or categories) as the current one, allowing readers to explore other topics.
Support & sponsorship
Something that has been asked more and more lately, and I'm very thankful for: FIVE STARS now accepts sponsors!
Whether you're a company or an individual, if you have ever benefited from my work and would like to support me, or if you would like to reach out the FIVE STARS audience with your awesome products, it's now possible:
please check out the new sponsor page for more details and perks.
A big THANK YOU to everyone that has been asking for this!
...and more!
There are plenty of improvements scattered around, and I'm sure I have forgotten some as this overhaul has been ongoing for several months, here are some important updates:
- FIVE STARS has now a new twitter account! Follow @FiveStarsBlog to be alerted on new articles, and more
- @fivestars.blog emails! If you have any comments/feedback you can now reach out via email at [email protected]
- FIVE STARS is a GitHub organization! All past and future projects will be hosted here.
Conclusions
Despite having completely changed format, both feed RSS and previous links to articles should be handled correctly.
With that being said, as this is a big change, things might have broken here and there: please feel free to reach out (via email or twitter) and let me know of any issue you might encounter, I will be very happy to fix everything!
If there's anything else you would like to see, or if you have any feedback and/or suggestion to make this website even better, feel free to reach out as well!
This is just the beginning: I'm incredibly grateful for how much FIVE STARS has grown in just two years, and I cannot wait to see where it will bring us next, thank you for reading!