Loading Park Labs...
Loading Park Labs...
LAB NOTE No.0162026.02.08Development
I've been polishing the Park Labs website here and there. Over the last few days I rebuilt the navigation and switched the images to WebP, and today, February 8, I added a lab notes marquee to the homepage.
When I first built it in August 2025, it started as "a portfolio that shows the list of experiments." But as I kept building, the site itself became an experiment. Design, performance, SEO, internationalization. All experiments.
What the site does now:
I rebuilt the navigation. The old one was clunky, so I redid it in a minimal style. I put extra care into mobile navigation too. It's a bottom nav bar, and it works pretty well.
All the images I'd uploaded as PNG are now WebP. File sizes dropped by more than half. Since it's served from Cloudflare Pages, even that much makes a noticeable speed difference.
Experiment cards now have region badges. Each one shows which market the experiment targets (Global, Japan, Korea), so you can see at a glance what's aiming where.
The lab notes marquee is today's addition. The latest lab notes scroll slowly across the homepage. Hover and it pauses, click and you go to that note. Built with CSS animation.
I also write on note.com, a Japanese content platform, so I added social links to the footer and the mobile sidebar. I have experiments aimed at Japan, so it makes sense to be on Japanese platforms too.
I automated lab note writing as well. I made a Claude Code skill called /note: throw in a topic and it handles numbering, generates the markdown in 3 languages, verifies the build, then commits and pushes. Writing notes got a lot easier.
Korean, English, Japanese. Built with next-intl. The translation files are already over 800 lines, and keeping them up is surprisingly hard. Every time I add an experiment, I have to write its description in 3 languages.
But I have experiments aimed at the Japanese market (FortuneToday, Uranai Musume, Care Kiro), so Japanese support is a must.
The site's design theme is "futuristic laboratory." Black background, translucent cards, neon gradients. It might feel a bit much, but I think it fits the lab concept.
I tried a convex glass effect on the unicorn progress card. It's a combination of inset shadow and gradient, and I'm not sure it turned out well.
It started out hardcoded, and I switched it to markdown. Drop a markdown file into content/notes/ and a note appears. Metadata lives in frontmatter, parsed with gray-matter.
Categories, moods and related-experiment tags all work. With 15 notes piled up, it's finally starting to feel like a blog.
The metrics dashboard still runs on dummy data, so I need to hook up real data. I also want to improve the experiment detail pages and raise the Lighthouse scores. Light mode... it's already dark, and I'm still thinking about whether to add one.
I didn't expect building the site to be this fun. It's home for all my other experiments, so I'll keep looking after it.