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A calendar view for my writing

Jim Nielsen added a calendar view to his blog last month and I liked it so much I’ve pinched the idea. My writing page now has a calendar view showing every article and note I’ve published.

The writing calendar in light mode: month grids for 2026 with coral dots on the days I published something, and a popover open on 18 September listing an article and a note — The calendar in light mode

The same writing calendar and popover in dark mode — The calendar in dark mode

Big dots are articles and small ones are days with only notes. Clicking a dot opens a popover with whatever I published that day.

It’s all HTML and CSS, with no client-side JavaScript. Jim’s version uses a bit of JS for its popovers, but browsers can do that for us now:

Each dot is a <button popovertarget> pointing at a native popover, so opening, closing, clicking outside and Esc all work natively.
CSS anchor positioning keeps each popover next to its dot, and position-try-fallbacks flips or slides it to stay on screen. anchor-scope lets every dot share one anchor name instead of each needing its own.
Each month is a seven-column grid, and a single grid-column-start on the first puts it under the right weekday.
A container query shows two, three, four or six months across, so the twelve months in a year always fill their rows.

Under the hood there’s a small function that lays out a year in UTC and a CalendarYear component that takes any list of dated things. It doesn’t care whether they’re posts, so I can reuse this for other content types with dates in the future.

Have a poke around the calendar, or read the pull request.