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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

#281

Post by nicbou »

Some features I implemented because I like them:

- A sidebar table of contents that highlights the current section

- Glossary links that open in a popup. It saves the trouble of redefining certain things

- Bottom line up front, or starting with the tl;dr

- Dark theme that follows system settings

- Content superseded by a calculator. Here's how you calculate your taxes, and here's a calculator widget that does it for you

- Larger, more readable font on desktop

- Narrower page margins on mobile to get longer lines

- Index pages without pagination, so that you can view all pages at once

- The /uses page where creators list the tools they use and the setup they have

- Non-chronological index pages for digital gardens. I love content that gradually improves, and best-of sections for the best bits

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#282

Post by lawn »

digging wrote: post #262

> 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.

What most do (and I've done as well) is to explain that in the paragraph before.

Of course, having it directly in the code block is better.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#283

Post by thesnide »

j2kun wrote: post #275
mrb wrote: post #270

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 o…

I added this on my blog ( https://www.jeremykun.com/posts/ ) and I even find it useful as replacing 90% of the need for a search bar. I haven't yet re-added a search feature since I migrated off Wordpress to hugo

So that.

I mean, just make sure that your blog is easily consumed by any web search engine.

And in addition to the full non-paginated index, I also have a full non-paginated tags page. Like categories, but with pages showing multiple times if they have multiple tags.

https://blog.pwkf.org/tags.html

My pet feature I'll try to add is sidenotes. It does annoys me to jump back and forth to read them. Even as a popup (wikipedia style), it is still intrusive...

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#284

Post by gnicholas »

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…

Funny, I quite like progress bars! I agree that they can be too bold at times, but it's nice to have a visual indicator since scroll bars have disappeared (especially on mobile).

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#285

Post by verelo »

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'm with you. This was one of the least readable websites I've used in a while...I like some of these ideas, but many i actively dislike.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#286

Post by hoten »

I found an enjoyable demo (can't find it now though...) of the animated table-of-contents feature mentioned here, and adapted for a website I maintain:

https://zquestclassic.com/docs/2.55/

I should add a check for `prefers-reduced-motion` https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#287

Post by thesnide »

mikevin wrote: post #276

I really like "archive" and "tag" overviews. I don't want to scroll through every post in full as a way of finding an entry that interests me. Not really a blog but Hackaday on mobile is really bad at this. It's kind of hard to filter for interesting stuff without having something specific to search for.

Yes, also having some "related" posts is nice.

Here is my way for jekyll, which I copy-pasted-adapted.

https://blog.pwkf.org/2022/08/13/adding-navigation-tags.html

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#288

Post by gnicholas »

rednafi wrote: post #249
mbforbes wrote: post #108

Since this article mention's Gwern's site several times: While I admire Gwern's work a lot, I often find his website is trying to do so much that my browser will really struggle. Especially on mobile. It's bad enough I usually avoid reading there, which is a shame. I'm not sure exactly what causes it, but it might be a combination of page length with many layers of nested, richly formatted and embedded content.

Ditto. I like Gwern's content but not much the presentation. The same goes for Simon Willison's site. I much prefer the brutalist look of Drew Devault, Fabien Sanglard, or Dan Luu's site.

I don't mind Drew or Fabien's layout, which have a reasonable column width. But Dan's site is unreadable for me (at least on desktop) without reader mode. What would be the reason for choosing to have full-width text on a blog?

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#289

Post by navanchauhan »

j2kun wrote: post #278

One thing I added to my blog, which is less "micro" but still quite important I feel, is syndicating articles on social media. I don't think static site generators have good support for this, so I had to roll my own: https://www.jeremykun.com/shortform/2024-05-12-2028/

I did something similar where I would be able to tweet the latest post if I wanted. It first breaks down the entire text into chunks and then uploads the relevant media as well. It also keeps track of the previous chunk that was posted and uses that ID to reply to it.

I never committed the twitter version to my repository, but you can look into the Mastodon version: https://github.com/navanchauhan/navanchauhan.github.io/blob/...

I don't actually use it though

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#290

Post by throwaway894345 »

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!

I'm just really glad that we seem to have mostly moved past headers that expand down in front of the content you're trying to read as you scroll down the screen. I can't think of a single justifiable reason for this behavior, but it was all the rage for a while. Also, I suspect the progress bars resurged because browsers became enamored with invisible or barely-visible scroll bars.

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