Are.na is where I’ve collected things for years; just channels of blocks that you connect to other channels. It’s anti-viral by design: you fall sideways into things, follow connections, disappear into rabbit holes. My work is scattered by nature: a Figma file here, a GitHub repo there, a talk on YouTube, an essay on someone else’s site. Every portfolio tool I tried made the opposite of the stackable, composable, generic, rabbithol-able portfolio I wanted.

Commonplace grid view showing Are.na channel blocks in a monospace panel
The grid view — blocks from Are.na channels rendered as a portfolio

In Are.na, the channel is the unit of arrangement: blocks that have types (Image, Text, Embed, Attachment, Link, Channel) in whatever order you give them, sub-channels nested inside, every block showing its lateral connections to other people’s channels. Also storage is important for a portfolio and Are.na can be a backend that can also standalone as a research artifact.

Borrowing the shape

Clement Valla’s Binder, which I found sometime in 2024, was the shape that I wanted. A single static page that read from an info.json. A menu of Websites, rendered as a draggable monospace table of contents panel that you can click through. Almost like a slidedeck, I liked the simplicity.

But Binder’s data model was a curated flat list and different from what use Are.na can offer. Are.na brought the structure of block types, nesting blocks, pagination. It reads the are.na API at runtime, so reordering blocks or connecting channels differently updates the portfolio without touching code. This meant curation and long-term maintenance would be easier since Are.na has cross-platform extensions and fully featured desktop and phone apps. It also meant that research and curation work could also be part of the portfolio.

So I rebuilt it and named it Commonplace. It has a Svelte 5 frontend, Are.na is the backend and Github Pages as the build target.

Channel drill-down view showing blocks and nested sub-channels
Drilling into a channel — blocks, sub-channels, and the connections strip

There is a canonical are.na channel that can be added to config.json. This is the root channel. But as I started exploring, I realised how powerful the hyperlinking in Are.na is. Even though I only addded one channel as the root channel, the linkages were taking me to various other channels almost in a test of the six degrees of separation rule.

Commonplace on mobile showing the responsive monospace panel
The same panel on mobile