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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

#221

Post by marcosdumay »

wongarsu wrote: post #135
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.

Well, you can in theory send an entire dictionary with your page to make it not suck.

I don't plan to ever do something like this for any purpose, and I have never seen anybody do it either... But you can.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#222

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

Those things are content.

If it's not the kind of content you want to put on your site, well, don't. But they are they are there to inform you of something. (Well, except for the link preview. Link preview is not good. At all.)

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#224

Post by bigstrat2003 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #87
xnorswap wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I miss when my emails didn't have adverts pretending to be emails at the top of my inbox. Here's a nickel, get yourself a better email client.

Yeah honestly if you're using Gmail as a "client" you're kinda causing your own problem.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#225

Post by gessha »

elric wrote: post #220
fanf2 wrote: post #167

Many 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.

To add to this, pages sometimes have comments or footers or other bells and whistles after the content that I’m interested in and it makes me think the post is longer than it is. This leads me to either leave the post for later or straight up close it because it’s too long.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#226

Post by shepherdjerred »

> Links to Other Sites

I used openring-rs for my Astro [1] site, but eventually replaced it with a TypeScript-native solution [0]. You can see it on my blog, e.g. at the bottom of this link [2].

If you're looking for an easy way to pull RSS feeds from TypeScript and show the N most recent posts, take a look at my library.

PS: I'm currently unemployed, so if you have any feature requests I will quickly oblige :)

PPS: if you haven't heard of Astro [1], do yourself a favor and check it out. You write JSX syntax and get static HTML/CSS out, with the option for JS only as needed.

[0]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/webring

[1]: https://astro.build/

[2]: https://sjer.red/blog/til/2024-06-05/

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#228

Post by wongarsu »

marcosdumay wrote: post #221
wongarsu wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, you can in theory send an entire dictionary with your page to make it not suck. I don't plan to ever do something like this for any purpose, and I have never seen anybody do it either... But you can .

Browsers take hyphenation hints: insert ­ in a word to tell it that it can put a hyphen there. Either combined with css ´hyphens: auto´ to tell the browser to also choose where to put hyphens, or ´hyphens: manual´ so your hints are the only thing that counts. Then just do it all server-side. Browsers still aren't the best at actually using that, but it's better than not hyphenating at all. (and of course you could write your own layout engine that uses your soft hints)

But shipping a whole dictionary wouldn't even be that unreasonable. A reasonable English dictionary is about 1.5MB compressed or 4MB uncompressed.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#229

Post by pc86 »

elric wrote: post #220
fanf2 wrote: post #167

Many 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.

Whether or not either of these is user-hostile is up to interpretation and preference, but you're stating it as if it is objective fact.

You see user-hostile shrinking of the scrollbar, someone else sees more room for content and hiding something that isn't necessary until you need it. You see loading content piecemeal as hostile, someone else sees blocking that 1kb of text from being displayed while you do more network-intensive work as hostile.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#230

Post by 12_throw_away »

This is a really great list (well, maybe not link previews, but everything else).

Sidenotes in particular are something I want to see basically everywhere, not just blogs. Modern screens have tons of horizontal space, text is most readable in pretty fairly narrow columns anyway, and scrolling to the bottom just to read a footnote (or, worse, having it pop up in some janky pop-over) is really unpleasant. Happy to see them catch on the blog world at least.

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