Future idea: add an "activity pulse" (weekly bar chart and latest activity) to the home page's Latest News #267

This parks a design idea from the News and Activity design review (#266) for later. We're shipping the simpler "Latest activity" strip (option c1) on the home page first. This issue keeps the chart version on record.

The idea

The home page's Latest News section would keep its three news cards. Under them, a light Activity panel would show two things:

• a small bar chart with one bar per week, built from the Activity log and split into releases, lecture updates and translation updates, with news posts pinned on the week they were published;
• the 4 latest activity rows, where a same-day group of releases counts as one row, with a "View all activity →" link.

Screenshots

These are the c3 artboards from Claude Design's round-1 sheet. They predate round 2, so they show the old workshop and books pill colours and the round-1 row style.

Mobile (390px)

Why

• Volume and rhythm. It shows how much is happening, week by week, not just the newest item. That is the "sense of activity" the home page lacks.
• News stays first. The headlines stay first and unchanged, so the panel stays secondary.

Design notes (from round 1)

• Panel: #f8f9fc background, 1px #e2e8f0 border, 8px radius. There are two columns: the chart takes 1.4fr and the latest list takes 1fr. On mobile they stack.
• Heading and summary: "Activity" in Exo 2 at 1.4rem, then a one-line summary. As of 2026-09-28 that would read: "40 updates since Jun 12, 2026: 24 releases, 12 lecture updates and 4 translation updates."
• Chart:
  • a CSS grid with one column per week for the last ~16 weeks, with bars at most 112px tall;
  • stacked in one blue family: releases #0072bc, lecture updates #5aa0d8, translation updates #a9cdea;
  • month labels at 12px #666, and a legend;
  • news posts marked with the timeline dot (a #0072bc circle with a white ring and a #e2e8f0 halo), labelled e.g. "News · Jul 14".
• Accessibility: the chart is role="img" with an aria-label summary, and the latest rows are a real list.
  • This needs more work before building. The two lighter blues fail the 3:1 contrast guideline for graphics: #5aa0d8 is 2.68:1 and #a9cdea is 1.58:1 on the #f8f9fc panel, and adjacent segments differ from each other by only about 1.7–1.8:1.
  • Options: separate the segments with white gaps, darken the palette, or label the bars directly and rely on the text summary and legend. Showing a week's total with title on hover doesn't help keyboard or touch users.

Implementation sketch

• No charting library is needed. The Activity plugin planned in Design review: Activity and News pages #266 (a Jekyll generator over _data/activity/*.yml) can precompute the weekly counts by type at build time. Bar heights then become inline styles or CSS custom properties.
• The latest rows reuse the shared Activity row rules from Design review: Activity and News pages #266: same-day releases merge into one row, and same-day editions of a translated series merge into one row.

Open questions

• Data gap. The current log has no entries from Aug 21 to Sep 13, 2026, which shows as three empty weekly bars (Aug 24 – Sep 13).
  • That's because the old reporter missed them, not because nothing changed. For example, lecture-python.myst merged [lq_robust_bewley] verify observational equivalence lecture-python.myst#1040 (Aug 24), [qr_decomp] Some updates to code and wording lecture-python.myst#1044 (Sep 1), [sir_model] update code and text lecture-python.myst#1050 (Sep 6) and [linear_algebra] Some updates on code and style and typos lecture-python.myst#1054 (Sep 12) in that period.
  • Should we wait until the reporter changes in QuantEcon/reports-activity#91 (a private repository) have produced a few weeks of data, about 6–7 entries a week, before showing a chart?
• Colour. Should the chart be the page's one multi-colour moment, using the four logo colours, or stay in one blue family?
• Window. Should it show the last 16 weeks, or the last 3–4 months?

Related

• Design review: Activity and News pages #266: the News and Activity design review, where this idea came from.
• Discussion: an integrated News and Activity timeline on /news/ (Option B) #268: the parked integrated-timeline idea (Option B) for /news/.