Dashboard: Add section for announcements

[mootari]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The Observable team is constantly churning out new and amazing updates to the platform and its libraries. Unfortunately announcements of these updates are easily missable by casual users, as they will only appear briefly in the Trending section on the user dashboard (if at all).

Even following on Twitter or subscribing to the newsletter will not guarantee that users learn about all updates (e.g. the most recent update to Plot).

Describe the solution you'd like

Add a new section "Updates" to the dashboard, e.g. below "Trending", which will only contain announcement notebooks by Observable. This section could be sourced by, and link to, a collection that combines announcements from various channels (e.g. Observable and Plot).

Additional context

It might make sense to also exclude these notebooks from Trending, or at least from the 9-items Trending preview on the dashboard, to avoid listing notebooks twice, and to make room for notebooks by platform users.

[mootari]

Case in point: Introducing Cloud files and FileAttachment.xlsx() were published not even a week ago, but are already no longer listed in the top 9.

[CobusT]

Are you thinking of something like what is at the top of the Explore page? The 'Observable highlights'?

[mootari]

I had a more compact size in mind, like the "Recent notebooks" section on the dashboard. Also, the date would likely be an important bit of information.

This new section would be limited to platform and library changes (new features, deprecations etc) to give returning users quick access to the latest updates and help them get up to speed.