Requiem for a Fractal Forest

It’s been almost 2 years since the treehouse’s inception, and there’ve been a lot of changes in the project throughout. It all started on my holiday in August 2023, when I was bored without a computer. Reading Lobsters, I stumbled upon someone’s website, and it made me think a lot about how I could make a website I would love as an outlet for writing. A website that would truly be a reflection of myself, my own values, and my own quirkiness.

I opened the A5 notepad I had on me during that trip, and started sketching.

A website made out of bullet points. A tree of paragraphs, nesting forever and ever, where in every collapsed branch you could find something more. And it would grow into an ever-more-deeply-nesting fractal forest, a rabbit hole to suck you in for hours. Imagine Vsauce, but on a blog, and if all the tangents were optional.

I was really enjoying Logseq at the time, and it was my primary source of inspiration for the treehouse. It just felt like a natural way to organise thoughts, so I wanted to create something like it, but without the lagginess and chugginess coming with a bloated frontend app written in Clojure.

And that, my friends, is how the treehouse was born.

The implementation

When I came back home, I jumped straight to my code editor. First a data format. Then an HTML generator. And then some CSS to style it.

The first version of the treehouse was up and running.

It wasn’t much, but it worked. It proved the concept, so I started fleshing it out.

• I added some JavaScript to make the navigation more friendly.
• Fixed some UX details of the <details> element that bugged me.
• I made it so that branches could expand into lazily-loaded trees, so that you wouldn’t have to navigate away from the main page.
• I made it possible to permalink to branches of the tree, so that you could link parts of it to your friends.
• I wrote a script that would generate unique IDs for branches for me automatically, so that I could just run treehouse fix before a commit, and everything would be linkable.
• I added dates, so that you could keep track of when something was updated.
• And so many more things.

And of course, alongside all those technicalities, I was writing.

The treehouse is single-handedly what taught me to write regularly about my thoughts, observations, insights, and pet peeves. And through that, I taught myself to Write.
Text. Essays. Prose.

The treehouse has been on my mind as my main project ever since I started it.

It just resonated with me so strongly.
I cherished it like a beloved friend.

Everything I did revolved around the treehouse.

Most side projects I did were features, improvements, and weird experiments. Like that one time I wanted to add a sort-of-visual-novel-type-of-thing to the website, so I started banging out a whole Twine-like story graph editor.

It was all incredibly fun.

The limits

But throughout this whole process, I was constantly running into problems with the tree format. You see, the UX just plain sucked.

By that I mean, the basic UX of reading pages was pretty bad. It felt more like reading a braindump than a polished post, even when I spent hours on structuring, proofreading, and everything.

The nesting was distracting. The more of it was there, the worse it would get. I pretty soon learned you gotta dial it back down to the absolute minimum. 1–3 levels is enough. Root for introduction and headings, 2 for heading content, and 3 for tangents.

But it never felt right. As you expanded branches on the main page, they would drift rightwards. The indentation would quickly get out of hand, eating away all your precious screen space. I added indent guides to help combat it, but they didn’t help. It was like browsing an overly nested folder. Probably because it was precisely that.

The UI around it just felt like a huge distraction. Hovering over a branch always caused something to fade into your view to signal it could be interacted with, and I feel like it resulted in a lack of sense of stability to the pages. It was detracting you from the actual content of the website.

It was a fun quirk, but not much more than that.

I was also reaching the limits of the structure. A tree can only have one parent, but what if a post fits more than one category? Where do I put it then?

And what if I wanna edit posts on the web, or add a section for short tweet-like braindumps, or something?

It was all incredibly limiting.

The breakpoint

The moment I decided it was time to let go, was the moment I needed to do a layout change that’d be impossible with a tree.

I wanted to add my fursona to the right side of the screen.

Whatever I did, it would eat away too much space, and result in a feeling of imbalance. I had to eat away all the padding from the left side, but then the text felt too cramped. It was much too close to the edge of the screen.

The only real solution I could see was to limit the page to a smaller width, but that didn’t work with the amount of UI elements tree branches had.

So I abandoned them!

Welcome to the new treehouse. Or, rather, just house, because there’s no longer a tree. You can call it a meoooow~house if you insist.

But!

Even if it’s not a tree in structure, it still has to support the tree format for backwards compatibility. I wouldn’t wanna have to rewrite all those pages I’ve accumulated throughout the past two years.

But it’s the end of an era. I’ll slowly be rewriting some parts of the site to this document-oriented format, just like this page. But maybe that isn’t such a bad thing?

There are lots of ways you can make a really fun blog post. This one comes to mind immediately, and honestly—would you be able to make something that amazing with a tree structure?

Because I wouldn’t.

So… welcome to the new treehouse :3