Homepage News Panel Design

Date: 2026-09-06 Status: Design approved in conversation, awaiting user review of written spec

Goal

Add a lightweight “News” panel to the homepage so short updates can be published in a tweet-like style without cluttering the stable self-introduction content.

The News panel should:

• keep the homepage introduction focused on long-lived research identity,
• make short updates easy to publish and maintain,
• support chronological ordering automatically,
• and allow a news item to link out to an external project or resource.

Audience

Primary audience:

• academic peers,
• potential collaborators,
• repeat visitors checking for recent activity.

Secondary audience:

• broader visitors who want to see current work at a glance.

Design Direction

Use Jekyll posts as mini-updates and render recent news items on the homepage.

This approach is preferred over embedding updates directly in about.md because it keeps the homepage narrative stable while allowing short, dated updates to accumulate separately.

In Scope

• Add a “News” section to the homepage
• Use Jekyll posts in _posts/ as the source of news items
• Filter the homepage to show only posts intended as news
• Add the QClaw literature-tracking update as the first news item
• Remove the QClaw paragraph from the main research narrative if it is better represented as news

Out of Scope

• Full blog redesign
• Rich social-media-style interactions
• External CMS integration
• Automated ingestion of news from another platform
• Building a separate full news archive page unless needed later

Content Model

Each news item will be stored as a small Markdown post in _posts/.

Recommended front matter:

• title
• date
• tags or categories including news
• optional excerpt
• optional link

Each item should contain:

• one concise paragraph,
• optional outbound link,
• no heavy formatting requirements.

Homepage Placement

The homepage order should become:

1. Hero
2. Research Focus
3. News
4. Selected Work
5. Brief Background

Reasoning:

• Research Focus describes stable interests,
• News captures current movement,
• Selected Work remains a curated record of representative contributions.

Rendering Behavior

The homepage should display only the most recent few news items.

Recommended initial behavior:

• show the latest 3 items,
• include date and title,
• render a short excerpt or compact body text,
• optionally show a “Read more” or direct link when relevant.

Filtering rule:

• only posts marked with news should appear in the homepage panel.

This avoids mixing any future long-form blog posts with short news updates.

QClaw News Item

The selected paragraph from about.md should be converted into the first News item rather than kept inside the main research description.

Recommended wording:

I am building an automated literature-tracking system based on QClaw, a variant of OpenClaw, to monitor recent advances from journals and arXiv across bioinformatics, cancer biology, and AI for science. The system updates daily through public APIs and email alert parsing. I welcome collaborators interested in improving this tracking system.

This wording fits the “current update” character better than the “stable self-introduction” character.

Implementation Notes

Likely files to edit:

• _pages/about.md
• a layout or include used by the homepage, depending on the cleanest insertion point
• one or more files in _posts/

Possible implementation approaches:

1. Add Liquid directly inside _pages/about.md to render filtered news posts
2. Create a reusable include for homepage news rendering if the markup becomes non-trivial

Recommendation:

• start with the smallest clean solution,
• use direct Liquid in about.md unless the template gets too noisy.

Verification

Success criteria:

• the homepage shows a clear News section,
• only news-tagged posts appear there,
• the QClaw update appears as the first item,
• the main self-introduction remains concise and research-first,
• adding a future news item only requires creating a new _posts/*.md file.

Manual checks after implementation:

• verify post ordering by date,
• verify the news filter works,
• verify the homepage still reads cleanly,
• verify links render correctly,
• preview locally or via GitHub Pages deployment if available.

Notes

• This feature is intended to support lightweight, frequent updates with minimal maintenance.
• No git commit is created at this stage unless explicitly requested by the user.