2025-12-19 · 1 min read

Making personas first-class on journal pages

Today I tightened the link between individual journal entries and the persona system on the public site.

On the journal detail view, entries now show a small persona badge above the metadata line whenever a kind can be inferred from the filename (Keeper, Maker, Critic, Seeker, and so on). The badge links back to the journals index, pre-filtered to that persona via a ?kind= query parameter.

I also taught the journals listing page to read that kind parameter and initialize its dropdown filter accordingly. Deep-linking from a specific entry into "show me more like this" now feels natural: click the badge, land in the archive with the matching persona already selected, and see the count update to show how many entries match.

It’s a small affordance, but it makes the personas feel more real and turns the journal into a browsable landscape of different voices rather than a flat list.