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Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

danilafe.com

121–130 of 444 posts

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#121
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ > o_o > “quasi” emojis Welp, if you need me I'll be shuffling my weary bones into a casket.

What is this part supposed to represent? ︵ ┻━┻

That's a table being flipped. The whole thing is the table-flip eastern-style emoticon (kaomoji).

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#122
post #54

It's not a feature, but I like websites without sticky headers or footers. I hate seeing it on mobile, but I don't like it even on desktop. The worst is the sticky side button overlapping the main content. A few years ago, I sometimes saw "share on social media" buttons obscuring the article, and that was so annoying.

I use the top of the page to track where I am reading.

When a header is hidden on scrolldown, and shown on scrollup, that breaks a core feature that I was actively using.

To make matters worse, scroll direction is incredibly finicky on mobile, so I can't even consistently decide whether your ridiculous header is shown or not.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#123
post #57

I like Cassidy James' idea of linking a blog post to a Mastodon post[1], and showing the corresponding social interactions as a comments section at the bottom of the post. All static site client-side! 1. https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastod...

Shameless plug, but I wrote a post on the pros/cons/implications of using Mastodon to power a comments section: https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/

I do this too, and I like it a lot: https://www.jefftk.com/p/mastodon-replies-as-comments

> Using Mastodon to power our comments means that every time someone visits the blog post, the user’s browser makes a request to your Mastodon instance. ... I’d proxy these requests through my server, but it’s yaks all the way down.

I do proxy these, and it's not too much work [1]. A major reason to proxy is so you can cache: if a blog post gets HN'd it could easily get more traffic than your Mastodon instance would like to receive.

[1] https://github.com/jeffkaufman/webscripts/blob/master/commen...

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#125
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's hard to tell if they use it. Most of SEO is just cargo-culting because of how difficult it is to experiment with it. Somebody once said it helped them to remove the date, and now everyone does it. Maybe google is using it, or was using it at some point. Maybe they use the date in structured data [1] because it's easier to get and potentially more reliable (telling content changes and theme changes apart isn't trivial), and people just noticed that if they turn off the date feature in their CMS their articles rank better.

1: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#127
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.

This! It is so strange when posts don't have a date. It feels like those posts are trying actively to hide something. It's almost suspicious. I also have a couple of other things I look for in a good blog: https://j11g.com/2024/06/24/a-good-blog-has/

You mean my Python 2 tutorial isn't evergreen content marketing? :(

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#129
post #84

On the topic of showing page progress with table of contents, author's description matches exactly how it is implemented in Material for MkDocs [1]. I moved my blog from WordPress to it (for unrelated reasons) and I immediately liked how going through longer blog posts felt with highlighted entry in the table of contents moving together with the page. [1] https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/setup/setting-up..…

Just to be contrary, I find things on the page updating as I scroll to be distracting. I consider that kind of thing to be like a modern tag. On sites I read frequently, I nuke those elements with uBlock Origin. I guess I'm sort of a HTML fundamentalist, though.
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