06 · Series and the stream

The site divides content into series, but it also has one shared stream in which everything lines up chronologically. That distinction turned out to matter more than we assumed: a series is a declaration of form, and the stream is a way of reading. The regular reader enters through the stream. The reader from a search engine lands in a series.

Underneath there is one entry type. There is no separate type for photographs and another for essays. There is one object with optional fields: an image, a film identifier, images woven between paragraphs, a marker for an event distinct from the publication date. The fields that are filled in decide how the entry renders.

That decision was taken when the first photographic series arrived, and for a while it looked like taking the easy way out. In practice it rescued the next three series. When the idea of entries with film came up, no new type was needed — one field sufficed. When entries with images inside the text arrived, one array arrived. When the publication date had to be separated from the date of the event, one field arrived.

If each of those had been a separate entry type, each would have required its own route, its own template and its own branch everywhere entries are enumerated. Instead every series travels one route and one template.

The cost is that the entry type has a good many optional fields and the template a good many branches. That is an honest price and we pay it knowingly.