Quick summary
Pulse is a working timeline. The page itself never scrolls — exactly one column owns the wheel, with the nav hugging the feed from the left and the trends rail scrolling independently on the right. The composer leads the feed: a borderless box whose progress ring fills as you type, shows the countdown at 260, and turns red past 280 — at which point the Post button is disabled and stays disabled until you are back inside the budget. Under it, eighteen posts carry avatars, verified seals, live-ageing timestamps and a six-action bar whose counts move on the same frame as the click. Press Profile and the centre panel becomes a banner, bio, follower metrics and a four-tab timeline — without the window ever reloading.
Who this template is for
This build is for anyone who wants the feel of a modern social product — the instant click, the counter that argues back, the view swap with no page load — in code plain enough to read in an evening.
- Builders shipping a feed-shaped product — community, updates, changelog, social — who want the interaction loops solved before their own data arrives
- Developers who want a worked answer to “why does this app feel fast”: surgical DOM patches, one delegated listener per timeline, views that hide instead of dying
- Anyone studying the X/Twitter interface pattern — the three-column grid, the 280 budget, the action-bar economy — without wading through a framework to see it
What problem this template solves
Most product front ends you can actually read are either a framework tutorial with three fake rows in it, or a real app whose logic is buried under a build pipeline. This build is neither.
- Interface clones stop at the layout — the mechanics that make the product work are left as an exercise
- Real state rules are the hard part, and they are exactly what a screenshot cannot show you
- A build behind a bundler is a build you cannot read: the file you open is not the code that runs
What you get with this template
One HTML page, one stylesheet and ten JS modules in dependency order — the file you open is the code that runs.
- The full three-column shell: a right-aligned nav rail with badge counts and a rounded Post button, the 600px bordered feed that alone owns the scroll, and a trends-and-follow rail
- The composer with its live ring — code-point counting, the countdown from 260, the hard stop past 280, Cmd/Ctrl+Enter to post, and new posts landing at the top of the feed
- Six routed views — Home, Explore, Notifications, Messages, Bookmarks, Profile — on hash routes that survive opening straight off disk, with per-view scroll memory
Page sections overview
| Section | Purpose |
|---|---|
| One Scroll Owner | The page never scrolls; the feed does. |
| The 280 Ring | A counter that argues back, in code points. |
| Surgical Toggles | A click repaints one button, nothing else. |
| The Profile Swap | A second layout, no page load. |
| An Honest Corpus | Eight authors, eighteen posts, zero requests. |
Design & branding system
The design brief was the editorial look of the X timeline, executed in tokens rather than screenshots.
- An ink-black ground with one signal blue — the accent carries links, the ring, the active nav state and the Post button, so colour always means the same thing
- Pink, green and blue action states tint their own buttons only on interaction, keeping the resting timeline monochrome the way an editorial page should be
- Inter end to end with tabular numerals on every count, so a tally can change without the row breathing
Mobile & speed optimization
The desktop grid composes down in stages instead of collapsing all at once.
- At 1100px the nav drops its labels to icons; at 1000px the rail bows out and the feed keeps its 600px measure and centres — long lines are the fastest way to lose a reader
- At phone width the action bar sheds its one stub action and a redundant tally so every real count stays on one row, verified by measurement rather than by eye
- Reduced motion retires the burst animation and the composer nudge while every toggle, count and view swap keeps working
How this template helps you convert
A working product beats a mockup. The page is arranged so a visitor can use the thing before deciding anything.
- Visitors interact immediately — the live build is on the page, with no signup or install in the way
- Every mechanic is inspectable, which turns a curious visitor into someone who wants the brief behind it
- The one-time prompt unlock is a concrete next step while the product is still open in the tab
Other information about this template
A few notes before you build on this one.
- Ten modules load as classic script tags in dependency order — icons, dom, data, store, components, composer, feed, profile, chrome, app — and the whole thing opens off the filesystem with no server
- A 69-assertion self-test drives the real app in a same-origin iframe: layout scroll ownership, every counter boundary, each toggle in both directions, and that the profile swap never reloads the window
- All person-authored text passes one escape function at the component boundary before mentions and hashtags are linkified — order-critical, and documented in the file headers
- Attachments, search, analytics and DMs surface a toast instead of pretending; Bookmarks is real and rebuilds from the live bookmark flags on every visit
Why it feels fast
a click patches one button — the store returns {active, count} and the handler flips a class and rewrites one text node, so nothing re-renders. All ~110 action buttons in a timeline are served by a single delegated listener. Views are never destroyed: once a route has been visited its DOM stays in the tree with hidden set, so Home → Profile → Home is a class toggle plus a restored scroll position. Post cards carry content-visibility: auto, letting the browser skip paint below the fold.
The character budget
length is counted in code points, not UTF-16 units, so one emoji costs one character. The ring is a stroke-dashoffset arc that fills to len/280 on every input event with no debounce; exactly 280 still posts, 281 cannot. Person-authored text is escaped at the component boundary before @mention and #tag linkification, in that order, so user copy can never become markup.
Screenshots
Captured from the live build, section by section. This is the template as it actually renders, not a mock-up.
