paperboat.website Blog


Unified Navigation Bar

Published: January 7, 2026

Today it was time to clean up the navigation bar. paperboat.website is divided into panel view and site view. The panel is for logged in users. You can view your feed of blogs that you follow, edit your sites and your account. When I started building the project, each section had wildly different navigation bars.

The panel nav bar allowed you to access all site properties (settings, pages, posts and a button to view it in a new tab). This only showed up if you selected a page, though.

If you were on a site, you would get links to edit posts or pages (depending on which kind of page you were on) and there was a way to go back to the panel to access the site properties again.

This was not easy to navigate and I got confused many times. So I tried to unify both menu bars so they feel like they're the same thing. They still change depending on what you're allowed to do (can't edit someone else's site) but all links will always be where you expect them.

Also I moved the new page/post and edit page/post links to the site itself. Next to the post list and next to the page list you get a highlighted link to create or edit the content right form the site.

I think this works for now.


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