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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

#261

Post by xd1936 »

aethertron wrote: post #253
jefftk wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think by "proxy the requests", they mean, these are usually on a static site and the browser is directly pulling in the Mastodon content client-side. They want to be good citizens and add a caching layer that they run.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#262

Post by digging »

> Code blocks with origin

Honestly, I am baffled that anyone ever writes code blocks for multi-file projects without specifying the file name and path. Especially in a tutorial. I would just... never do that? If you have an actual repo to refer back to, fine, but saying "Write this code" without saying where to write it is just not good instruction.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#263

Post by contravariant »

baxtr wrote: post #104
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)

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

Again, you mean?

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#265

Post by vehemenz »

velcrovan wrote: post #36

I went pretty far in the direction of these features on my personal sites in the 2010s. They are fun coding and design challenges. Nowadays I am going the other direction. For the most recent design on my personal site, I even have a “no footnotes” rule, on the theory that (for me at least) footnotes can be an indication of scattered thinking and/or insufficient editing.

My thoughts exactly. There is a time and place for footnotes, sidebars, and citations, but they take attention away from the body text and, when overused (gwern.net), the entire site can look cluttered and disorganized. Most people aren't going to read these things anyway, so you're better off focusing on concise, effective writing.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#266

Post by hnlmorg »

rednafi wrote: post #248

My most important microfeature is center-aligned pages. Whenever I read something on a large screen and the content is left-aligned, leaving a large gap on the right, it really turns me off. I try to make [mine]( https://rednafi.com ) center aligned on all clients.

> Whenever I read something on a large screen and the content is left-aligned, leaving a large gap on the right, it really turns me off.

I’m curious, why do you find that an annoying? The alternative you’re advocating is ostensibly just shifting half that gap to the other side.

If I were to be fussy about the gap then I’d be more interested if they were a layout that could make use of that space rather than alignment. The example in that article about side notes is a great example of utilising otherwise redundant space on larger screens.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#267

Post by 082349872349872 »

dspillett wrote: post #187

> 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. This is unfortunately too often not the case, as people see fit to hide the default scrollbar and have something of their own that doesn't always show or is barely obvious. Though I agree with ToCs and showing progress that way, for pages long enough to make it useful rather tha…

> > Grouping Series of Posts

> Yes, though I might argue that such links, or a link to a ToC page for the group, belong in a more general list of related links.

Indeed, in the salad days of HTML there was some way to put related page-links in the , and Sir Tim's browser displayed UI that enabled navigation via them.

Unfortunately that feature was already lost by the mid-1990s.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#268

Post by fabianholzer »

swyx wrote: post #156

for those who want related thinking i defined my list of table stakes features for blogs here https://www.swyx.io/the-surprisingly-high-table-stakes-of-mo... across reader experience, author experience, and developer experience (for self maintained blogging software)

It is a compilation of many great ideas. Thanks for putting it together. For my needs table stakes are lower, but as inspiration as well as aspiration certainly.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#269

Post by FullGarden_S »

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 horizontal progress bars are annoying but I think I'm fine with vertical progress bar to the side on heading navigation, highlighting the currently reading sub-heading.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#270

Post by mrb »

One micro feature I implement on my blog that I would like to see everywhere: a single-page index of all the posts, like at https://blog.zorinaq.com

Don't paginate this. I want to see at a glance the titles of all the posts the author wrote. I want to be able to ctrl-f to search these titles. Heck, even if you had 100k titles they could still easily be shown on one page, as it would compress to 1 or 2MB transmitted on the wire which is still more lightweight than the average web page size.

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