Look, I love making fun websites. Give me wild animations, quirky layouts, unexpected interactions—the whole nine yards. But here’s the thing I’ve been wrestling with: fun doesn’t always equal optimal reading conditions.
You know what I’m talking about. You craft this beautiful, chaotic homepage with personality bursting from every pixel, and then someone actually wants to, you know, read your 2,000-word essay about whatever nerdy thing you’re passionate about. And they’re squinting at 14px text stretched across a 1400px wide container while animated SVGs dance in the peripheral vision.
So I came up with a compromise: Cozy Mode.
The Origin Story
This whole thing started when I saw Matt on X talking about how he likes to read narrow passages of text and discussing optimal reading layouts. It got me thinking—what if I could give people the best of both worlds? Keep my fun, personality-filled site design, but offer an escape hatch into typography nirvana for anyone who actually wants to read my writing.
And then I thought: I bet Claude could help me build this.
What It Does
Cozy Mode transforms any blog post into a distraction-free reading experience with all the research-backed typography goodness you could want:
- 66 characters per line (the optimal line length according to actual studies)
- 1.5 line height for that perfect reading flow
- 18px font size (16px on mobile, 20px on larger screens)
- Beautiful Georgia serif for body text
- Dark mode toggle because of course
- Font size controls that remember your preferences
Under the hood, it’s using Mozilla’s Readability.js to extract just the good stuff—your actual content—and present it in a clean modal overlay. No sidebars, no widgets, no distractions. Just pure reading bliss.
And here’s the really cool part: it’s fully accessible with keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and WCAG AAA compliance. Because readable means readable for everyone.
AI Made This Possible
I’m genuinely excited about the fact that I could go from “wouldn’t it be cool if…” to having a fully functional WordPress plugin in a matter of hours. Claude and I built this together—I’d describe what I wanted, Claude would help me understand the typography research, write the code, debug issues, make it accessible.
This is the stuff that gets me pumped about AI. Not replacing human creativity, but amplifying it. Making it possible for anyone with an idea to actually bring that idea to life, even if they’re not an expert in every domain it touches.
I’ve got dozens of these little “wouldn’t it be cool” ideas rattling around in my head, and now I can actually build them. That’s pretty magical.
Try It Out
Want to see Cozy Mode in action? You’re probably reading this post right now, so just click the little icon in the corner on desktop or the button at the bottom on mobile. Your eyes will thank you.
And if you’re a WordPress user who wants this for your own site, the plugin is available for free. Because everyone deserves a cozy reading experience.