I think I saw it first on Julia Evans' blog (https://jvns.ca/categories/favorite/). I also added it to mine (https://thorstenball.com/blog/) and found the exercise of going through the posts and tagging them very enjoyable.
Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
291–300 of 444 posts
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#292One 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…
Many sites have it, since it is helpful for SEO. Examples:
https://www.1500days.com/sitemap.xml (Wordpress) https://dri.es/sitemap.xml (Drupal, illegible though) https://aaron.axvigs.com/sitemap.xml (Drupal, legible)
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#293Since 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 suspect my site would fall afoul of some of the taste around here but I didn't think Simon's was bad as far as they went.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#294* Tastefully displays the most relevant citation at the bottom of the screen as you read, e.g. see https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/
* Uses system light/dark UI settings.
* Literally every article (with descriptions, author info, post date, etc) displayed on the homepage in chronological order with no pagination, great for ctrl-f, etc.
* Selected authors and category-based navigation available.
* Entire site is very fast and lightweight, text-focused, no superfluous javascript or CSS, good typography, works well on mobile, etc.
* First-class RSS feed support
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#295RedSails.org has a lot of very nice micro-features: * Tastefully displays the most relevant citation at the bottom of the screen as you read, e.g. see https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/ * Uses system light/dark UI settings. * Literally every article (with descriptions, author info, post date, etc) displayed on the homepage in chronological order with no pagination, great for ctrl-f, etc. * Selected authors…
It’s just nice to see folks wanting minimalistic but functional features. I’m ticking quite a few of these on a service I’m working on. You can see my blog running on it https://lmno.lol/alvaro
Not yet officially launched. Happy to share invites to use now (for early adopters).
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#296One 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
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…and now DDG just does it for me. Zero cost, zero hassle.Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#297Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#298Many 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 t…
The same thing happens with books that include references at the end — a print book can be 20% endnotes. I've even encountered bizarre EPUB's where for some incomprehensible reason there's a page break between each endnote, so the actual content of the book ends somewhere around the 5% mark of total page count.
I actually really appreciate a super-thin (2px) progress bar in the header.
I don't like an always-visible table of contents because I find it really distracting. But I really like the way Wikipedia does it in their app, where it's a single tap to reveal the table of contents full-screen, centered on and highlighting your current section.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#299Almost all of these are pretty nice. I disagree with the preview-on-hover though. That sends off a request to a possibly unknown (possibly unwanted) destination. I often hover a link to look at what the URL popup says in the bottom corner, before following it. It's just not a very privacy-conscious feature, even if convenient.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#300One 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…
Another reason: I'll often come across a blog post from 12 years where the author writes "in my next post, I'll continue to discuss..."
And how the heck am I supposed to find that next post? They didn't add a hyperlink, obviously, because they hadn't written it yet. Sometimes a blog has posts you can navigate by month, but that's definitely a small minority of blogs I come across.
If there was just a single-page index, I could Ctrl+F the title of the current article, and quickly see what followed it chronologically.