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Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

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Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#31

Post by hifromwork »

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 people whose native language is not English? I assume it works the same way as for everyone else, i.e. it's always an approximation anyway. I'm not from an English-speaking country, but I'm pretty sure I read faster than the average English native.

The other interpretation is that you mean people who can't read English at all, but in this case I understand even less. They won't be able to read the article, if they don't speak the language. After automated translation, the reading time should be roughly correct again.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#32

Post by breck »

anais9 wrote: post #5
self_awareness wrote: post #3

Printing 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…

> if you have comments or an otherwise large footer not associated with the content of the post

I think the better solution in this case is to use the (relatively) new html tags: Comments

Demo:

https://try.scroll.pub/#scroll%0A%20%0A%20expander%20Comment...

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#33

Post by jorams »

self_awareness wrote: post #18
jagged-chisel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, but it is visible when you scroll. Progress meter is also at 0% when you're not scrolling, so unless you scroll, you don't know how much text there is to read. (btw, just checked for Firefox and Safari, and the scrollbar is visible at all times, unless the website explicitly hides it)

> (btw, just checked for Firefox and Safari, and the scrollbar is visible at all times, unless the website explicitly hides it)

There is a setting for this called "Always show scrollbars" and I know it defaults to off for me. The underlying about:config rule is specific to GTK though, so this may be platform-specific.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#35

Post by kqr »

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)…

Tables of contents are tricky. My publishing logic is rather flexible in how I use them, so I used to put them into the margins of longer articles[1] and sometimes even shorter ones[2] although I wasn't great at always remembering to do it[3].

But the problem for me is that good headlines, that give a fair summary of the section they are for, make for really wide tables of contents which don't fit neatly into the margins[4], so sometimes the table of content has to occupy space in the main section[5] which seems to me like it distracts a bit from the actual content.

[1]: https://two-wrongs.com/markov-chains-for-queueing-systems.ht...

[2]: https://two-wrongs.com/verifiable-software-development-estim...

[3]: https://two-wrongs.com/event-sourcing-and-microservices-unix...

[4]: https://two-wrongs.com/word-embeddings-in-perl.html

[5]: https://two-wrongs.com/what-is-probability.html

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#36

Post by velcrovan »

I went pretty far in the direction of these features on my personal sites in the 2010s. They are fun coding and design challenges.

Nowadays I am going the other direction. For the most recent design on my personal site, I even have a “no footnotes” rule, on the theory that (for me at least) footnotes can be an indication of scattered thinking and/or insufficient editing.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#37

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

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…

I was thinking about this recently as I added it to a site. The use case is slightly different because the site in question was more data-driven than a blog. One example is viewing an individual item and being able to navigate to the next item in alphabetical order. This uses link elements with the appropriate rel values.

The problem of losing context can be mitigated by having the page return to the previous location on back, something which browsers kinda already do, just not very well.

Alternatively, I assume you'd prefer some kind of modifier? This has problems of its own — e.g. shortcut clashes. YouTube uses comma and full stop as frame next/previous shortcuts — maybe we should standardise on those?

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#38

Post by FrostKiwi »

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)…

Doing a direct mapping from Markdown Headings to Table of contents+Anchors via Eleventy [1] is what I went with for my blog [2], simple setup, works perfectly.

[1] https://github.com/FrostKiwi/treasurechest/blob/4d96694a912e...

[2] https://blog.frost.kiwi

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#39

Post by drekipus »

velcrovan wrote: post #36

I went pretty far in the direction of these features on my personal sites in the 2010s. They are fun coding and design challenges. Nowadays I am going the other direction. For the most recent design on my personal site, I even have a “no footnotes” rule, on the theory that (for me at least) footnotes can be an indication of scattered thinking and/or insufficient editing.

I don't have the time for editing. but i don't often have footnotes. I'll try and write the content in, and link where I must.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#40

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #9
self_awareness wrote: post #3

Printing 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.

> On Apple platforms, they hide the scrollbar unless you’re scrolling.

On macOS, at least, this is a setting so you can make them visible or invisible according to your taste. Probably not available on phones, though.

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