Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
1–10 of 444 posts
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#2Maybe it's just me, but I'm not so much of a fan of Dialogs as demonstrated here, especially when there are a lot of characters, each of which have a different role that is only communicated by going to a separate page to read about them. If I wanted to explain something in an article I was writing, I would just explain it in the same way I'd do everything else, with a separate paragraph, maybe with some links to relevant sources that I used to become familiar with the topic too
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#3Printing CSS doesn't get enough love. The ability to easily create a PDF for later, or to simply print the blog post on a piece of paper to read it outdoors is something I value.
Also, I'm confused about some points. For example, is progress meter really necessary? I mean, isn't the scrollbar a good indicator for the progress?
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#4Oh this is a great list. Thank you. A few things on here that I'm now going to spend the day bringing to my site. I like how you explicitly called out a few things Gwern does. I love that site but hadn't examined closely _why_.
Here is a few additional things not on your list that I love and have implemented on my blog:
- Plain text versions of all posts. Change the file extension on any page on my site from ".html" to ".txt" to view it as plain text (https://breckyunits.com/intelligence.txt). Makes it easy to copy/paste a whole post into an email or Reddit submission
- View source links at the bottom of every page. Every post is 1 file tracked by git, and I put a "View source" link at the bottom of each page. Even the static pages are also one file, and also have a View Source link.
- Clientside full text search - https://breckyunits.com/search.html.
- CSV export. In addition to RSS, you can download my site as CSV (https://breckyunits.com/posts.csv).
- Keyboard nav. Use the left/right arrow keys to navigate through pages on my site.
- Helpful 404s. If you mistype a url, the 404 page compares it to working urls and shows you the closest match. All done using clientside JS (no web server needed). For example: https://breckyunits.com/pcr.html
- Download entire site and read offline. Everything is designed to work fine locally and you can download the whole thing as a zip. (The link is at the bottom of every page)
- Printable. Everything is designed to look decent printed. Nav elements are hidden via CSS when you go to print. I haven't added automatic generation of PDFS yet, but that is on my todo.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#5Printing CSS doesn't get enough love. The ability to easily create a PDF for later, or to simply print the blog post on a piece of paper to read it outdoors is something I value. Also, I'm confused about some points. For example, is progress meter really necessary? I mean, isn't the scrollbar a good indicator for the progress?
A progress meter may not be necessary, but as the article points out if you have comments or an otherwise large footer not associated with the content of the post, the scrollbar can be deceiving.
I'm personally a huge fan of the progress meter (having once thought it was redundant as well) - one other easy addition I didn't see mentioned is an "estimated reading time." Having a ballpark range for how long I should expect to spend with a piece of content greatly increases my chance of engaging with it, and the progress meter creates a tangible representation of that time (and how much of it I have left to finish consuming the content).
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#6Maybe it's just me, but I'm not so much of a fan of Dialogs as demonstrated here, especially when there are a lot of characters, each of which have a different role that is only communicated by going to a separate page to read about them. If I wanted to explain something in an article I was writing, I would just explain it in the same way I'd do everything else, with a separate paragraph, maybe with some links to rel…
It takes a lot of skill on the part of the author - I don't think I'd risk it personally.
But I like the way it's handled on fasterthanli.me enormously - the author there successfully anticipates a lot of my "wait, but..." thoughts and addresses them directly via this mechanism, or, conversely, makes me realise that I ought to have had an objection to the point they're making.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#7Printing CSS doesn't get enough love. The ability to easily create a PDF for later, or to simply print the blog post on a piece of paper to read it outdoors is something I value. Also, I'm confused about some points. For example, is progress meter really necessary? I mean, isn't the scrollbar a good indicator for the progress?
A progress meter may not be necessary, but as the article points out if you have comments or an otherwise large footer not associated with the content of the post, the scrollbar can be deceiving. I'm personally a huge fan of the progress meter (having once thought it was redundant as well) - one other easy addition I didn't see mentioned is an "estimated reading time." Having a ballpark range for how long I should ex…
I'm not sure how "estimated reading time" works for non-english speakers.
As for "progress meter" being an optimization of websites with large footers or long lists of comments, I'd argue that a better optimization technique would be to remove the footer, or remove/hide by default list of comments (i.e. make it available with a mouse click somewhere).
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#8Printing CSS doesn't get enough love. The ability to easily create a PDF for later, or to simply print the blog post on a piece of paper to read it outdoors is something I value. Also, I'm confused about some points. For example, is progress meter really necessary? I mean, isn't the scrollbar a good indicator for the progress?
[deleted]
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#9Printing CSS doesn't get enough love. The ability to easily create a PDF for later, or to simply print the blog post on a piece of paper to read it outdoors is something I value. Also, I'm confused about some points. For example, is progress meter really necessary? I mean, isn't the scrollbar a good indicator for the progress?
The scrollbar is not reliable. On Apple platforms, they hide the scrollbar unless you’re scrolling. I think CSS lets us specify that it should be visible on our own pages, but I don’t know how that interacts through browsers to the native behavior.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#10Printing CSS doesn't get enough love. The ability to easily create a PDF for later, or to simply print the blog post on a piece of paper to read it outdoors is something I value. Also, I'm confused about some points. For example, is progress meter really necessary? I mean, isn't the scrollbar a good indicator for the progress?
A progress meter may not be necessary, but as the article points out if you have comments or an otherwise large footer not associated with the content of the post, the scrollbar can be deceiving. I'm personally a huge fan of the progress meter (having once thought it was redundant as well) - one other easy addition I didn't see mentioned is an "estimated reading time." Having a ballpark range for how long I should ex…
in the early days of blogs, i found comments to be interesting and engaging dialogs. the last decade, or so, i’ve found comments to be unhelpful nitpicking/personal disagreements, spam, or support requests, so i’ve completely stopped concerning myself with comments on blogs.
so i’ll agree that progress indicators are helpful for this use case.