The site redesign — state, decisions and where everything is (2026-09-13)

Read this before touching the Reading theme, the reader, the collections or the notebook. It is the handover from the session "Website Redesign 1" (2026-09-12/13, omni, gated log): what was decided and why, what was built and where, what is gated, what is known to be missing, and how to test it. PLAN.md's top three sections (site_next, the reader, phase B) are the implementers' own notes and go deeper on code; this file is the map.

1. What this is, in one paragraph

The owner wants a327ex.com to feel organized and purposeful instead of a feed, with books presented Kindle-like (two facing pages, horizontal turns) and books and games mixed. The thread produced: a 51-mockup board (Fable + Astra), a codified dark theme kit (THEME.md + eight sheets), and three Opus 5 implementation runs that built the whole thing into the renderer as an OPT-IN theme called Reading (site_next in code). Nothing about the default site changed for visitors. The redesign is committed (be030a7 and the two commits after it) and deployed, but gated: visitors on the web cannot select the Reading theme.

2. Where things are

3. The design conclusions (why things are the way they are)

From the Fable/Astra discussion (round two settled most of it; the mockups tested it):

1. Choosing, reading sequentially and consulting are the governing distinction, not "stock versus flow". The front door is for choosing; the reader is for sequential reading; logs plus search are for consulting. That is why logs still scroll while stories, essays and the notebook page.
2. Works get lasting homes. A book and its game are one work; the home holds the thing, its development history (the log series) and related essays. This is the seed of the future "one story = novel + game" presentation.
3. Pages are windows onto the single-column layout. No second layout engine: the reader computes break offsets at text-line and element boundaries and draws each page by translating and clipping the column. Every element draw, selection, find and link hit-test keeps working in column coordinates. This is the architectural decision that made the build cheap and safe.
4. The round-one readers looked "lacking" because their pages were empty. Real text at a book measure in the same chrome reads as a book. Pages must be full.
5. Position addresses and citation addresses are different things. The reader remembers a place by element-and-line ordinal (per device); page numbers are never in URLs; persistent block ids for public citations are future work.
6. Gold locates, blue acts. Gold is only for the current item, entry ids and progress. Artifact and replay links became blue under the theme.
7. The notebook is a book whose chapters are months (mockup 34): the untitled posts paged in the reader's chrome, newest first, days as the contents overlay.
8. The daily broadsheet was dropped (a day is an arbitrary layout budget) in favor of the paginated notebook.
9. Instant cut on page turn, no curl, no paper. Wheel flick turns one page (debounced); edge zones only in the free outer margins; clicking on a page never turns it.
10. Mock-up decisions the owner made (2026-09-12): front door = image 5 (works + notebook column), reader = 7 (then 28 v2), notebook = 12/34, work homes 15/16/40/41, logs 17/45, replay 21/42/48. The dark theme of those images is the theme. He said the sidebar is unnecessary and text can be smaller.

4. The theme (run 1: 20260913-site-theme-build)

• THEMES.site_next in theme.lua, with its own FONTS_NEXT / METRICS_NEXT / GAP_BEFORE_NEXT / TREAT_NEXT; switching to or from it relayouts (like posts_old). Type scale per THEME.md: page title 32/40, item title 18/24, body 16/24, UI 14/20, meta 12/16, section label Segoe UI Semibold 12/16 tracked 1.2, ids/paths Cascadia 12/16, code 14/20, h1/h2/h3 28/21/16. Arial 700 stands in for every 600 the kit asks of Arial; the only true 600 is the section label. Metrics: the scrolling article keeps column_w 800 / text_w 704; body_line_height 1.5; gaps h1 24, h2 24, h3 16, image 16, quote 24; heading_rule = false.
• Fourteen new color keys exist in EVERY theme (panel, recess, control_border, link_hover, link_pressed, current, focus, hover_wash, current_wash, on_accent, overlay, warning, text_secondary, text_dim), derived from each theme's own palette, so drawing code can read them under any theme.
• Chrome under the theme: no sidebar; a 64 px top line (NAV.draw_bar in main.lua) with the brand, the section links, a search affordance and settings · privacy · archive. Mobile chrome (the 44 px bar + hamburger) is unchanged under every theme.
• Element treatments under the theme only: pill chips (chip_metrics / draw_chip / chip_colors in elements.lua, shared by the log page and the homepage), hover-only link underlines, no heading rules, blockquote rule 1 px / role bar 3 px (canvas_theme_sync), mediacard as a 64 px file row with an outlined Open pill, tweet card as a rounded panel (padding 16, avatar 32, radius 8), code blocks in the recess well, small_italic upright (metadata is not italic in this theme).
• Selection: settings stepper Dark / Light / Reading, F2 cycles the same order, the persisted setting accepts the theme, A327EX_THEME=next on desktop overrides for a run.
• site_debug globals in main.lua for headless drives: theme(name), nav(path), view(), snap(path), state(), reader(cmd, arg), collection, scroll.
• Left alone on purpose: per-role line boxes and a separate reading scale (the renderer has one shared line gap), letter tracking outside the section label (the engine's text has no tracking), the collapsed tool rows, log-turn speaker typography, focus rings (no keyboard focus model), the Aa reading-settings popover, the serif for book prose.
• Known nits: the admin pageviews readout collides with the top bar under the theme; the scrollbar overlaps the bar's right end by a few px; nav labels are capitalized while the trailing cluster is lowercase.

5. The reader (run 2: 20260913-site-reader) — renderer/reader.lua

• Entry point: reader_wants(d, theme, pref) / reader_doc_pages(d): a story or a titled post (essay), under site_next, with the "Reading layout" setting on Pages (default). Old-Blot docs (Theme: old, 42 of them, every pre-2023 file, including It Follows, Luck isn't real and Status addicts) DO page and render in the theme when paged; in Scroll mode or under Dark/Light they keep their old skin. The brief had excluded them; the implementer resolved it toward the verification set, one condition in finish_load_page plus its mirror in reader_sync.
• Geometry (THEME.md "Reading geometry"): spread from 1120 px, page width min(624, (W - 2*outer - 32)/2), gutter 32, measure min(528, page - 64), outer margin 48/32/16 by breakpoint, header 64, chapter strip 64 (when 2+ h1s), gaps 24, footer 48, page numbers 32 above the page bottom. It Follows: 252 pages at 1920x1080, 283 at 900x1000, ~300 ms to lay out and break; breaks_ok (a programmatic check that no line is cut) is true.
• Atoms and breaks: one atom per laid-out text line (el._lines already carried y and height), one per non-text element; containers are not atoms. Greedy fill with widow and orphan control, headings keep two lines, the ending reserves 112 px on the last page, trailing blank atoms dropped. A code block is ONE atom (revisit if paginated logs land). Oversized atoms get their own page scaled through the layer transform; video and games are never scaled (cut at the page bottom); a scaled page is not hit-tested.
• Clipping by culling (a line is on the page if its midpoint is inside the band), not by stencil (the engine's stencil is one global flag that code and video already use).
• Chrome: the top bar shows brand, work title, Contents; chapter strip for chaptered works (current in gold with real progress; names dropped below 104 px per cell); footer Previous / "Chapter N of M" or "page N of M" / Next; the ending block ("END OF