If you have a blogroll, update it regularly. I get that blogs are passe (that's why I started one a while ago). It is annoying to go to one of the few active blogs and find that most of the blogroll links go to sites not updated in a decade or expired altogether.
Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
211–220 of 444 posts
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#212It's comforting to see blogging as a topic on HN front page, along with plenty of constructive comments. I'll take some of the ideas on board. I've been working on a blogging service myself (here's my blog on it https://lmno.lol/alvaro ), focusing on minimalism, hopefully enabling the content to shine on any kind of device (you can read from your favorite terminal too). You drag and drop your entire blog from a markd…
The import/export reminds me of my own little blog generator project I've been working on over the years (super immature)
Essentially, your whole blog is just one file called "resume.json" that describes where all your post/pages come from, they could be external or local resources linked -> https://github.com/jsonblog/jsonblog-cli/blob/master/blog.js...
And then you have "generators" which are just functions, that can take your blog.json and output all the required html/assets to build it e.g. https://github.com/jsonblog/jsonblog-generator-boilerplate
The main idea being that you only ever have to keep safe your blog.json, which you could put as a gist or anything.
Love your setup so far, will follow along.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#213Link previews have been widely discussed and sometimes criticized. Some notable implementations include Wikipedia, Google Docs, and Obsidian. IMHO, a link preview adds value when it provides enough information for me not to follow the link and open another tab.
I've created a Linkz.ai link preview script for blogs & websites - it adds fast (no iframes) summaries that appear on hover, and, optionally, on-click, it extracts linked articles, videos & embeds and shows them within the blog. When fewer people follow hyperlinks, it's a win-win situation; the website owner improves its retention and visitors are not overloaded with new tabs.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#214Maybe 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…
Agree.
I'd always thought that inline dialogs with fictional characters were more for the author's entertainment than the reader's, so I was surprised OP and others in the thread like them.
I have nothing against them if people like them; just a matter of taste.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#215Lots of great features here! On the link preview feature, both Wikipedia's and Gwern's implementations put the preview on top of the main content. I think this is much nicer to put to the side, where its less intrusive: https://www.jefftk.com/p/preview-on-hover
Nice! I also like link previews from Linkz.ai. Here is the demo (also see how it opens the YouTube hyperlink): https://advancemed.com.au/medical-internship-australia-2025-...
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#216Hot take, but the microfeature I love in blogs and websites is a date at the very top. I know patio11's points against it, but from a user perspective it just adds so much context that for me it's a no-brainer.
I hadn't heard of patio11's points against it. So I looked it up.
https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/content-m...
Is this the man responsible for the popularity of dateless blogs? (I tried to check the date on the post but... alas! ;)
Just kidding, we still have the Internet Archive (for now) so I am able to get the same information ("2014") in a much less convenient way... (I suppose my willingness to do so removes me from the category "most readers?" Though that will depend on the blog!)
The argument seems to be "people will disregard the information in an article if they think it's old." I can't speak for other people, but I actually find the opposite is true. The older a post, the more likely I am to find it interesting, and take it seriously.
Same idea as this, really: https://xkcd.com/2634/
>>What does the red line through HTTPS mean?
>Oh, just that the site hasn't been updated since 2015 or so.
>And since it's been around that long, it's probably legit.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#217I appreciate when blogs include a "start here" section, like https://tomcritchlow.com/start-here/, or equivalent. Sometimes a bunch of content can overwhelm a new visitor, so entry points are appreciated. See also:
- random post button
- most popular posts
- author's favorite posts
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#218someone’s site (I forget whose) has a built in inflation adjuster so that they write dollars(x, year) and get a future-proof value. Very cute!
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#219What if there were a standard object that everybody rendered to their taste? To some, these are nice features, to others it's just bloat that causes a 5mb download for 1kb of text.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#220Many of these suggestions are good. (I should make my subheds clickable!) But a couple of them, oh dear… I really hate progress bars, they are incredibly distracting. One of the worst examples of front end programmers wasting their time reimplementing browser functions badly. I already have scroll bars! I do not need more scroll bars! Also, link decoration: my browser already has a nice discreet indicator to tell me…
I think progress bars are a logical consequence of the user-hostile shrinking of the scrollbar. Unusable, narrow things which are often hidden by default, and rarely have a visible elevator (or thumb) anymore. Of course, scrollbars are often entirely useless in pages which insist on loading content piecemeal -- another user hostile pattern.