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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

#301

Post by adityaathalye »

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?

On the web, I like footnotes more provided they link back to the referencing text. On my blog, I love to use footnotes for little tangents and asides, apart from their usual task of providing references. Not every post/article needs them.

Sidenotes are cool, but they are a skeuomorphism not amenable to fluid layouts. I feel plain vanilla in-line disclosure elements work better, and they might be better for accessibility too.

In dead tree books, I enjoy both. Marginalia can elevate the text. Footnotes are always in context of the whole page, which I can view all at once. No scrolling needed.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#302

Post by orhmeh09 »

Gormo wrote: post #238
IggleSniggle wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The world's most popular podcast is the Joe Rogan Experience. Which part of Spotify is using an RSS feed for that?

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#303

Post by iamwil »

The microfeature I like is when posts have the full date. Blog authors want their content to be evergreen so they try to exclude it. Context is essential for me to interpret the perspective, especially for technical content. I end up having to go to the internet archive to see an estimate of when they wrote it anyway.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#304

Post by zzo38computer »

xnorswap wrote: post #50
squidbeak wrote: post #29

RSS should be a core rather than a 'micro' feature.

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…

It still exists, even if it is not used as much these days.

I have email without advertisements.

Some web sites will have RSS, and you can add it to your own if you want to do. (Although I think Hina-Di is better in some ways)

Other protocols also are still used, even if not as commonly. (I use IRC and NNTP, too.)

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#305

Post by slater »

crazygringo wrote: post #300
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…

Yes please! 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 sing…

> And how the heck am I supposed to find that next post?

Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed?

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#306

Post by crazygringo »

aaronax wrote: post #292
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…

There is a "back-channel" way for most sites: sitemap.xml 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)

Sadly, sitemaps aren't usually much help because:

- They're often only URL's which may not have titles or dates at all

- They're often not in any particular order (there's no reason for them to be chronological, so they frequently aren't)

- They're often paginated as well, where sitemap.xml just refers to multiple pages, so you can't Ctrl+F on a single page anyways

- You don't get one per-blog if there are multiple blogs on a domain

- You get all the other junk from the rest of a site if it's a blog that's part of a larger site

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#307

Post by crazygringo »

slater wrote: post #305
crazygringo wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes please! 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 sing…

> And how the heck am I supposed to find that next post? Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed?

These days an awful lot of blogs don't have RSS feeds.

Especially blogs that are part of broader news publications, in my experience.

But yes you're right when there is a feed you can open that in Chrome and Ctrl+F, at least.

(Obviously my complaints come from blogs that don't have this. But also, opening an XML file isn't exactly user-friendly, and 99% of end users would never know to do it.)

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#308

Post by giantrobot »

k1ndl1 wrote: post #244
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…

I liked that Daniel mentioned link previews. I've seen Vittorio from Linkz.ai posted how link previews would look on Daniel's website: https://x.com/linkz_ai/status/1805253204583575860

Link previews don't really work on mobile. Also they just create UI land mines. If I mouse over some area of the page I have unexpected content jump up. If a link preview hits the external link that's also potentially leaking traffic or tracking data from me.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#309

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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…

A less distracting version of the scrollbar might be a progress marker beside the text at 25% progress increments.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#310

Post by antihero »

crazygringo wrote: post #298
jonahx wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly this. When you're reading different news sites, you never have any idea which sites load hundreds of comments at the bottom and which don't. What you think is a long article actually turns out to be 80% comments by page length. 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 the…

Personally I just look but I see the value of very subtle scrollbar.
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