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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

#91

Post by pacifika »

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.

The scroll bar is at least as reliable as the progress bar meter surely.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#92

Post by noneeeed »

netcraft wrote: post #83
hypertexthero wrote: post #55

Good list, though here comes my Hacker News-style pesky comment: Justified text on a screen is a feature that makes my eyes and brain hurt. Ragged text is much easier to read. Uneven and beautiful, like a plant whose details you rest your eyes upon as you observe, rather than a uniform concrete structure where vision is lost. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)

I totally agree. I think its because it lets my eyes get their bearings, like sensing the terrain.

This is absolutely it for me. It's also why I like paragraphs to have some level of spacing between them.

I'm currently reading a book that has quite minimal indentation on the first line of a paragraph, no spacing between, small font, and justified text. Every page is just a wall of text. It makes it noticeably more tiring to read than others that I've read recently. It seems to be a trend in more serious historical tomes. The last one I read, the Beauty and the Terror, was similarly typeset.

It's one of the reasons I like reading on my kindle.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#93

Post by eXpl0it3r »

fabianholzer wrote: post #34
squidbeak wrote: post #29

RSS should be a core rather than a 'micro' feature.

Should, but sadly I have lost count how many feeds in my reader became dysfunctional because they were rewritten to be using nextjs (or the likes).

Unless it's a corporate-ish site, I've found that asking the authors to add an RSS feed can work quite well.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#94

Post by arberavdullahu »

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)…

I think Notion has nailed it with the new design of their table of contents [1]. The problem with the current general approach is that if a blog post is very long and you are in the middle of it, you might forget what the content was. However, having a very small item on the right that you can quickly peek at is awesome.

[1] Example https://www.notion.so/notion/Table-of-contents-50de58f824bf4...

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#95

Post by chuckadams »

self_awareness wrote: post #41
jorams wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.

I was checking this on macOS. I have system scrollbar setting set to "automatic". Never changed scrollbar settings in Safari/Firefox, so it works like this for me by default, not sure why. But also I don't really get how people are fine with hiding the scrollbar, but prefering to see the progress meter always visible for text, when the scrollbar conveys mostly the same information (except some edge cases when the foo…

The scrollbar is per-page, the meter is per-article. Lots of blogs where I see a progress meter also have multiple articles on one page, sometimes even infinite scroll. I personally find the meters kind of superfluous, but they don't bother me since they usually stay out of the way.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#96

Post by Helmut10001 »

aranw wrote: post #78
Helmut10001 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, I know what you mean and agree. This date is currently mostly for myself. Maybe I should format it differently, or place it somewhere else.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#97

Post by underdeserver »

keiferski wrote: post #61
Puts wrote: 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.

This is so unfortunate. Like with the recipe sites, I don't understand how they can miss such obvious fails.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#98

Post by chuckadams »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #27

Ironic considering the entire page appears to be aligned to one quarter of the page on the left.

Centered for me at my usual browser width, then jumps to the left when widened to make room for the single side note example. A note that, boo hiss, doesn't show up at all at narrower widths. Not that it was an important note, but we're talking principle here.

My mini-gripe is the typography: While I'm typically a dark mode guy, thin fonts are a lot harder to read in dark mode. But I've seen worse.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#99

Post by dangus »

I'm not a fan of sidenotes/footnotes. It's a writing style that's scatterbrained and quite irritating to me.

And on top of that, how is it going to work on mobile?

One who does a lot of writing should work on avoiding sidenotes and footnotes altogether. If there's something related to the article that is important or noteworthy, incorporate it into the main piece.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#100

Post by OptionOfT »

Puts wrote: 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.

And even if you see dates, quite often they're relative. A year ago could mean a lot.

Oh, and while blogs are usually newest on top, relative dates break the ability to derive sort order by looking at multiple values, if they're all the same.

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