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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

#231

Post by breck »

JadeNB wrote: post #201
breck wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd immediately close it and never come back. You wouldn't get a complaint from me; you'd just lose me instantly and permanently. Do you think this concerns me? I don't make this site for you, someone who admits they've "never used" my site. I make my site for my regular readers, some of whom have been reading the site for over 10 years. The people who regularly email me comments and feedback on my posts. People wh…

> a new language (Scroll) that is mathematically shown to be the simplest/most powerful language yet invented This is, at best, ambiguous. To show something mathematically, you have to have a precise definition of it, and neither "simple" nor "powerful" admits a precise definition that is widely agreeable enough for any mathematical proof based on it to be worth anything.

I stand by my claim.

I point you to https://breckyunits.com/pcri.html

Further background:

- https://breckyunits.com/intelligence.html

- https://github.com/breck7/breckyunits.com/blob/main/research...

- https://github.com/breck7/breckyunits.com/blob/main/research...

- https://github.com/breck7/breckyunits.com/blob/main/research...

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#232

Post by rsync »

I have developed an entirely different approach to these blog/site features - such as sidenotes and TOC - that I refer to as an “Iceberg Article”.

It is explained here:

https://john.kozubik.com/pub/IcebergArticle/tip.html

“An Iceberg Article is a single page of writing which links to a larger collection of supporting documents, resources and services.”

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#233

Post by rcarmo »

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.

My URLs have the date in them, and all posts have the original date near the title. I do updates (and update internal metadata), but removed the modification date because it was confusing to people…

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#234

Post by microflash »

zoidb wrote: post #11

> Easily Linkable Headings I haven't found a nice way to do this on both desktop/mobile. What I want is for every heading to have an anchor link that can be copied, similar to a hyperlink. I see a lot of sites do this with a [unicode chain symbol] which is present on hover, but that's not an option on mobile. Alternate option is to have it next to every heading (ugly), turn every heading into a hyperlink without styl…

Try this.

/* keep the icon hidden by default */ :is(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) .icon { visibility: hidden; }

/* show the icon on focus and hover */ :is(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6):focus .icon, :is(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6):hover .icon { visibility: visible; }

/* show the icon on devices that don't have any accessory that can hover */ @media (pointer: coarse), (any-hover: none) { :is(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) .icon { visibility: visible; } }

The `pointer: coarse` media query checks if you are using a device with an input mechanism of limited accuracy (such as fingers on a touchscreen). The `any-hover: none` media query checks if none of the input mechanisms on your device support hover (such as a Surface tablet not attached with a keyboard).

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#235

Post by dahauns »

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 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!

And the icing on the cake - as demonstrated in the quanta link - is the horizontal rendering in combination with a generous sticky wasting precious space I'd rather use for, well reading content.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#236

Post by mschuster91 »

gessha wrote: post #225
elric wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> To add to this, pages sometimes have comments or footers or other bells and whistles after the content that I’m interested in

Or, especially in news sites, Taboola and other bottom feeder trash.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#237

Post by bookofjoe »

I celebrate the 20th anniversary of my 365 days/year Typepad blog on August 20, 2024.

For a long, long time it's appeared to me that I'm the last person on Earth still using Typepad, which since it started being bought and sold a decade or so ago has had gradual serious decrements in speed and functionality.

It takes on average 10 seconds to upload a photo, and usually 2-3 attempts because of broken links.

Many times a past post which was intact now appears with broken image links.

And yet, I'm still able to post even though I probably know as little about code as anyone who visits HN.

My technical deficiencies are why my blog looks almost identical today to its appearance at inception.

At 76, I'm too old to do anything but continue in the same fashion.

A question: Is there anyone else here who uses Typepad?

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#238

Post by Gormo »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #141
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…

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.

> and I still consume all of my podcasts via RSS feeds.

Considering that a podcast is an RSS feed, it's not like there's any other option. People using fancy modern podcast apps might not be interacting with the RSS feed directly, but the software they're using certainly is.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#239

Post by WorldMaker »

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.

Most of these progress bars are as thin as the native scrollbars have gotten (or thinner). If these are solely a consequence to the shrinking of the scrollbar, you'd imagine that they'd actually be bigger.

I think that's a large contributing factor, but either most implementations are are as deficient [0] as what they are trying to augment or there are other things at play here. (Branding since websites haven't been able to consistently style browser scrollbars since the IE/early Firefox era; as the other comment points out, trying to counterbalance how long pages have gotten with "after-content" such as ads and comments and recommended articles and "infinite scroll" to more articles.)

[0] Or arguably worse deficient: Most of them seem to have no real accessibility themselves and are opaque to things like screen readers. Even if modern scroll bars are hidden by default and woefully tiny visually by default, they still have decades of accessibility baked in and accessible options (if you can find them).

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#240

Post by input_sh »

wonger_ wrote: post #207
adityaathalye wrote: post #139

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…

Do you prefer footnotes over sidenotes? And do you think each post/article should have footnotes?

Sidenotes can't be on the side on a small screen. You have to put them in between paragraphs, at which point they stop being sidenotes and just become part of the text. Then, how do you handle them in your RSS feed? What happens if the reader clicks on the reader view button in their browser?

Footnotes always remain footnotes, regardless of all of that.

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