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Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

danilafe.com

141–150 of 444 posts

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#141

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

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…

Most of my media content is podcasts, and I still consume all of my podcasts via RSS feeds. I have yet to run into a podcast where this did not work. RSS isn't the past, it's the future, and painting it as dead is an odd characterization in my view when it's alive and well.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#142

> 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.

That's a problem of ads/comments being even there.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#143

I don't like side notes. It tries to separate the readers to two groups---one who wants more details and the other who doesn't, but the problem is that there's no such natural division. When I read articles with side notes, I often find myself constantly checking the side notes and then regret doing it because the info is unnecessary. I prefer the author to carefully think through and choose what info to present inst…

This seems like evidence that there is a natural division and you're in the second camp, no?

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#144
post #104

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)

Meta comment: that’s the third comment I see this week with “quasi” emojis. Is this becoming a trend? o_o

These are called kaomoji. More generally, emoticons.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#145

Nowadays it's like every single blog and website will "popup" something everytime i select text. It annoys me to no end, because I select text as I read along and it's incredibly annoying. Whether be it ChatGPT, medium articles, and recently even Google search! UBlock Origin allows you to block JavaScript by default on all websites, and it's what I do. And Firefox has something called reader mode. Absolutely fantasti…

If you don't want to outright block all JavaScript you can just block 3rd party scripts, it usually lets you see if the website uses some fuckery or not.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#146

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.

ah yes reader mode, undoing "loved" features since 2010!

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#149

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.

There's some of these that I think are overkill, sure, but I like the simplicity of some of them - sidenotes, progress bar, etc. Just little things that give you that much more information about what's going on. Gwern's page, to me, is too much.

My personal favorite mixture of style and implementation of these features is jefftk.com - simple, fast, but gives a ton of information in an unobtrusive way.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#150
Almost all of these are pretty nice. I disagree with the preview-on-hover though. That sends off a request to a possibly unknown (possibly unwanted) destination. I often hover a link to look at what the URL popup says in the bottom corner, before following it. It's just not a very privacy-conscious feature, even if convenient.
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