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Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

danilafe.com

251–260 of 444 posts

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#251
Forcing opening in a new tab can go die in a fire. I don't understand how browsers even support that. It's so abused.

If I wanted it in a new tab, I'll bloody well open it in a new tab myself. The feature is right there. Don't overrule the user. That should be illegal.

Now instead i click, have to go back, close the old tab, and history is wiped. Thanks for nothing.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#252
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!

This is addressed though in the following paragraph (indirectly), where a table of contents is rendered on the side. (Similar is a minimap, which I like for code or complex articles, but not for long text-heavy articles.) Maybe you also hate that, but it actually serves a purpose that scrollbar can never replicate and is much more useful than a scrollbar for many people.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#253
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shameless plug, but I wrote a post on the pros/cons/implications of using Mastodon to power a comments section: https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/

I do this too, and I like it a lot: https://www.jefftk.com/p/mastodon-replies-as-comments > Using Mastodon to power our comments means that every time someone visits the blog post, the user’s browser makes a request to your Mastodon instance. ... I’d proxy these requests through my server, but it’s yaks all the way down. I do proxy these, and it's not too much work [1]. A major reason to proxy is so you can cache: if…

I would simply throttle those requests. Update comments once an hour. Or once a day. Not everything needs to be realtime.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#254
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…

+1 on finding progress bars distracting. I personally feel like they also "hurry" you into reading faster. If I see a progress bar, my first instinct is to try to finish as quickly as possible, even if that means a poorer understanding of the text.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#255
post #229
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.

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 netw…

Regarding scrollbars, it’s user-hostile if the user can’t control it according to their preference.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The thing is, I do like to see details and I'm curious. That's why I check them in the first place. But we can't know beforehand whether it's useful or not. This is true for both footnote and side note, but for footnotes I can give it a glance to see if I want to read it thoroughly after reading the whole page, whereas for side notes, they are so easy and tempting to be seen. I feel the point of notes is that they do…

> otherwise the note becomes the main content.

There are some authors whose footnotes (even sometimes indices) I read before the main content, because in the past they've hidden all the best bits there.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#257
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…

To be fair, the author notes this and offers an alternative:

> One immediate thought is that this is completely superseded by the regular browser scroll bar that’s ever-present at the side of the page. However, the scroll bar could be deceiving. If your page has a comments section, the comments could make the page look dauntingly long. Similarly, references to other pages and general “footer material” count towards the scroll bar, but would not count towards the progress bar.

> Combining the two, you could imagine an always-visible table of contents that highlights the current section you’re in. With such a feature, you can always see where you are (including a rough estimate of how far into the page you’ve scrolled), and at the same time see how the current section integrates into the broader structure.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#259

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…

I think that just means the author is writing bad side notes. Structurally, they do have a place. You said that yourself - "I do like to see details and I'm curious". An author moving all their side notes into the main content would not make it clearer. An author deleting their useless side notes would make it clearer. Neither of those speak to the usefulness of side notes.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#260

Maybe 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…

Agreed. I can rarely identify with the character(s) I’m supposed to identify with, and it’s virtually always a tedious read.

It’s also possible to use a question-answer style without having a dialog and characters. What would that look like? Well, similar to this very paragraph. Not that I would particularly recommend it either.

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