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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

#131

Post by ants_everywhere »

OptionOfT wrote: post #100
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.

A similar thing that really perplexes me is that GitHub uses relative dates. You try to find the date a certain change was made, and you end up scrolling through page after page of "six years ago."

It feels like the sort of thing that is only really sticking around because it was a design trend many years ago when some of these apps were written.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#132

Post by fluidcruft »

One site I like a lot is https://mriquestions.com/index.html

It has a really interesting navigation where there's an article, links to related articles, and references etc.

Part of what I really like about it is the format of having the main text and then an "Advanced Discussion" accordion at the bottom that can be folded out for more detail. It's not uniformly used across all pages but I do like the format a lot. It's sort of an alternative to sidenotes but less disjoint where it treats the first part of a page as the intro and then expands in detail directions. It lets the intro be a higher-level and then "corrected" below.

Example (just one I found, there are better ones but not all pages have them):

https://mriquestions.com/how-to-reduce-sar.html

Anyway just chiming in that it's a microfeature that I like vs say wikipedia which can just be... massively overwhelming on some pages.

I don't necessarily think this feature is fully realized at mriquestions, but the MRI field suffers from multiple audiences (radiologists, technologists, engineers, etc) and its really difficult to pull content together that foster communication between these groups. mriquestions is by a radiologist so its a bit lacking on the engineering details side but its still pretty good but higher-level technologists use it well to get beyond the lies we tell them. It doesn't really get too far into the lies we tell radiologists though but sometimes it gets close (by lies I mean oversimplifications) and usually the references are good for the technical details.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#135

Post by wongarsu »

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)

Justified text is beautiful ... in narrow-ish columns with good hyphenation. But hyphenation sucks on the web, and without hyphenation you can't even do narrow columns even in the rare cases where it would make sense for the reader.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#136

Post by eadmund »

> If you want to show progress while the reader is somewhere in the middle of a page, you could use a page progress bar.

There used to be a great feature available in every scrollable window which showed one’s position: the scrollbar. The bar itself was nice and wide, and there was an indicator right there which showed where one was in the document. They were useful, and they were consistent.

Then scrollbars got skinny, and then they disappeared. And so now each page which wants such a thing has to reinvent it. Also, it’s very difficult to actually scroll windows anymore.

Edit: yeah, he does mention that it’s nice to know position in the article versus in the comments. Point, and while separate windows/panes/frames/whatever would be one way to handle it, his suggestion is probably better.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#138

Post by 65 »

mhb wrote: post #48
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.

Nicholson Baker would like a word.

David Foster Wallace would also like a word.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#139

Post by adityaathalye »

Nice list! I like many of these "microfeatures" too. Some I have on my site (https://evalapply.org), some I don't because I don't want to require Javascript for blog functionality. I think I have a few others not in that list.

This is my set of "microfeatures", which are all available in the post I linked below [1].

- All posts must have title, summary, dates (published, updated), one tag at least, and hot link to top of post (it's always #main)

- Open graph metadata for all pages (title + summary)

- All first-party content must be accessible as plain HTML

- Typography and separator elements to establish structure and distinguish functionally different areas of content

- In-page navigation (especially jump links to and from footnotes)

- Table of contents when needed, in a disclosure element

- Custom navigation to group a series of posts

- Markers for external links

- Captions for images and embeds

- Disclosure elements for extra context

- Footnotes (with links back to the referring text)

- Index pages with summaries (the main blog index, and each tag's index)

- RSS feed (global)

So far I'm reasonably happy with things as they are. At some point I'd like to participate in a webring.

[1] https://www.evalapply.org/posts/emerging-from-dotemacs-bankr...

(edit: typo, and a point I forgot)

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#140

Post by reportgunner »

carimura wrote: post #133

I came to the comments expecting more pushback but I'm surprised. What happened to the simplicity of reading articles without status indicators, link popups, notes, conversations, ...? OK, table of contents, you're cool.

Also 0 mentions of reader mode.
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