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Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

danilafe.com

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Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#21

Post by self_awareness »

swasheck wrote: post #12
self_awareness wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

something to hide comments altogether would be remarkable

That's why I like blogs with Disqus -- I've cut all traffic to Disqus servers through uMatrix, so the comments won't even show up.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#24

Post by klabb3 »

I don’t know if it’s a feature, but a summary/tldr/abstract at the top is imo better even than TOC. Not only are to-the-point abstracts amazing for the reader, but also for the writer. Oftentimes when you can’t summarize properly, it’s because the article isn’t focused and needs rework.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#25

Post by breck »

jsnell wrote: post #19
breck wrote: post #4

Oh 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"…

> - Keyboard nav. Use the left/right arrow keys to navigate through pages on my site. Please don't, this is horrible and I've previously only seen it used by clickbait news sites. It provides no real value, the only use case of somebody wanting to browse through just the start of each of your articles is going to be incredibly rare. But what you're doing is hijacking a key that normally has no effect into having a de…

In theory is the same as in practice, in theory. But in practice, they're different.

> It provides no real value,

This is wrong. It provides a tremendous amount of value. Source: I use it many times a week, for many years, for many reasons.

> destructive one.

This is wrong. These pages are immutable with no state. If by chance you accidentally hit an arrow key on one of the rare long form pages with scroll, sure you lose about 50 milliseconds of time getting back to your prior scroll level. In years of doing this not a single person has ever complained, while instead a number have commented that they like it.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#26

Post by codetrotter »

g15jv2dp wrote: post #16
kibwen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have an icon appear on hover, and make every heading a hyperlink (even without styling), and have a table of contents with links to each heading (with styling). No need to dumb down your interface just for smartphone users.

What's the point of the icon if the heading is already a hyperlink?

The anchor symbol can have JavaScript that copies the link to clipboard on click. And the heading can be a plain old link to itself. Gives a nice visual and interaction for desktop while providing a way for mobile users to get the link too (long-press the heading and copy link).

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#28

Post by breck »

jasoneckert wrote: post #20

These features are all sage advice for any blog in my opinion, and this blog is a good example of one that is easy to follow as a result. Regarding the Table of Contents feature, however, I believe this makes a big difference in larger blogs, but for medium sized or smaller blogs, it can be a distractor. I use Hugo as well for compositing my site, and find that using ample first level headings (e.g., # Heading name)…

> Regarding the Table of Contents feature, however, I believe this makes a big difference in larger blogs, but for medium sized or smaller blogs, it can be a distractor.

Ah. That resonates. Thank you for breaking it down like that. I've pondered adding ToC, but now realize it's only for a small subset of pages that it adds value, rather than distracts.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#30

Post by fabianholzer »

self_awareness wrote: post #7
anais9 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> I'm not sure how "estimated reading time" works for non-english speakers. >

Do you mean for non-native speakers reading English material or for material in other languages when read by native speakers with an average reading competence in their native language?

Anyhow, as a non-native English speaker, it implemented it on my site by showing both the word count, as well as an estimated time, which is simply calculated by dividing the word count by a constant number of assumed words per minute.

That number was guesstimated by doing some reading speed tests on myself and researching average reading speeds and rounding up to 10 wpm. I have to admit that my assumption of 240 words per minute does not hold up to any scientific scrutiny, but otoh it is an estimation.

It works ok for prose. As soon as other notation is mixed in (code, math, graphs, diagrams etc.pp) that begins to naturally to vary wildly in accuracy.

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