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Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

danilafe.com

71–80 of 444 posts

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#71
Asterisk magazine (https://asteriskmag.com/) is the only site I know of that does the thing that the author couldn't find an example of with a progress bar that includes section headings (on hover) and thus shows your progress through the table of contents. On mobile, where there is less space, it falls back to just being an ordinary progress indicator.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#72
post #47

A feature that seems to have disappeared from a lot of blogs these days is date when a post was published. Sometimes date is required to put things into context and I can't understand why so many blogs these days don't have it.

Google punishes websites that don’t have recent content, no matter how good it is.

Google knows whether your content is recent or not regardless if you have a timestamp on it, because they crawl periodically and according to recent leaks they do store this information.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#73
post #47

A feature that seems to have disappeared from a lot of blogs these days is date when a post was published. Sometimes date is required to put things into context and I can't understand why so many blogs these days don't have it.

Others have commented on it being SEO-related, but I think there might be a psychological component to it as well, where you don’t want people to bounce because they think it’s an old and irrelevant article.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#74

> Bonus: Showing Page Progress I just look at the scroll bar.

Only really works if one article takes up most of the space. If there's tons of ads/coments below, the scrollbar would show less progress than actually is the case, and vice versa with wasted space above the article.

But yes, the scrollbar ought to be enough.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#75

Maybe 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…

I prefer this in an FAQ format with an omniscient-like asker.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#76
post #59

I value links. WordPress used to have a Links section in the sidebar by default. It was later criticised for the default links being to WP founders/devs. But it was there, and you could change it. Links are the web for me. "If you like my site maybe you will like what I like". Go look at https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/ - links! Go look at other sites and if they are WP chances are no link list. Am I blaming WP? Y…

Do you mean blogroll?

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#77
post #47

A feature that seems to have disappeared from a lot of blogs these days is date when a post was published. Sometimes date is required to put things into context and I can't understand why so many blogs these days don't have it.

Others have commented on it being SEO-related, but I think there might be a psychological component to it as well, where you don’t want people to bounce because they think it’s an old and irrelevant article.

Better than it actually being old and irrelevant but not being recognizable as such.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#78
post #47

A feature that seems to have disappeared from a lot of blogs these days is date when a post was published. Sometimes date is required to put things into context and I can't understand why so many blogs these days don't have it.

I have actually three dates on my blog [1], (1) the date I started writing a post (hardcoded in the url/name), (2) the date it was first published (defined in the markdown frontmatter) and (3) the date a post was last modifed (based on git commits). I think all three are relevant. [1]: https://du.nkel.dev/

I like the second and third date but I think the first is perhaps a little confusing to me without this context. If I didn't know this is what it meant I'd of thought they'd be some bug in your blog or you forgot to update the url

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#79
post #47

A feature that seems to have disappeared from a lot of blogs these days is date when a post was published. Sometimes date is required to put things into context and I can't understand why so many blogs these days don't have it.

Others have commented on it being SEO-related, but I think there might be a psychological component to it as well, where you don’t want people to bounce because they think it’s an old and irrelevant article.

ah, the youtube strategy: strip out useful heuristics and make the user experience objectively worse, ad impressions go brrrrr

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#80
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might cop a lot of hate for saying this, but it's been 10 years, it's time to stop mourning RSS and move on. I loved RSS, I sorely miss the protocol based internet rather than the web based internet we have now. I miss when my emails didn't have adverts pretending to be emails at the top of my inbox. Advertising was a lot less prevalent when applications had protocols and you could simply move to a different client…

> I might cop a lot of hate for saying this, but it's been 10 years, it's time to stop mourning RSS and move on. I can't comprehend where this notion that RSS is somehow "dead" is coming from. RSS is ubiquitous: every major blogging platform, aggregator, and other media site continues to offer feeds, including all of the major video sharing sites. The entire podcasting ecosystem is based on RSS. I consume HN, Reddit,…

Yeah I subscribe to everything from major tech news sites (Ars Technica, The Verge for example) to tiny blogs. RSS is very widely adopted, even if nobody is making noise about it or trying to hype it up. Anything but dead.
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