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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

#311

Post by patio11 »

andai wrote: post #216
weinzierl wrote: post #206

Hot take, but the microfeature I love in blogs and websites is a date at the very top. I know patio11's points against it, but from a user perspective it just adds so much context that for me it's a no-brainer.

I hadn't heard of patio11's points against it. So I looked it up. https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/content-m... Is this the man responsible for the popularity of dateless blogs? (I tried to check the date on the post but... alas! ;) Just kidding, we still have the Internet Archive (for now) so I am able to get the same information ("2014") in a much less convenient way... (I suppose my willingness t…

A commanding percentage of all citations of me on e.g. Twitter will apologize to the user's own audience for the age of the piece, in a way which is obviously suboptimal.

For examples, see this thread: https://x.com/patio11/status/1234141833661440001

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#312

Post by elevatedastalt »

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.

I don't think Gwern's site is optimized for mobile viewing at all. It works great on a desktop and I think that's where such long form is best consumed.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#313

Post by giantrobot »

orhmeh09 wrote: post #302
Gormo wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Spotify exclusive "podcasts" aren't really podcasts any longer. They're Spotify Exclusive Content calling themselves something that's no longer valid. The same is true of any platform exclusive content.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#314

Post by elevatedastalt »

gnicholas wrote: post #288
rednafi wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Dan's website is a great example of the pendulum swinging in the other direction to malicious non-conformism. Yes, UXers have made modern web design hell, but presenting a raw unstyled html isn't respecting your user much either.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#315

Post by rsync »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #250
rsync wrote: post #232

I have developed an entirely different approach to these blog/site features - such as sidenotes and TOC - that I refer to as an “Iceberg Article”. It is explained here: https://john.kozubik.com/pub/IcebergArticle/tip.html “An Iceberg Article is a single page of writing which links to a larger collection of supporting documents, resources and services.”

What's a good example of an Iceberg Article?

That link is, itself, an I iceberg article.

Click on the “body” link in the footer to see the full expansion…

"Network Slug", which I sometimes discuss on HN, is also an iceberg article:

https://www.kozubik.com/pub/NetworkSlug/tip.html

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#317

Post by j2kun »

thesnide wrote: post #283
j2kun wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (wik…

The hugo theme I use has this built in, and the sidenodes change to footnotes if the width is too small. https://github.com/capnfabs/paperesque

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#318

Post by j2kun »

navanchauhan wrote: post #289
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…

I currently have Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky working. Sadly, it seems Twitter downranks bot-generated threads.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#319

Post by nicbou »

rat_on_the_run wrote: post #114

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 use them a lot on allaboutberlin.com, because some readers are familiar with certain things and others are not. This lets me serve both audiences while keeping the guides short and straightforward.

I very rarely use footnotes except for citations, unless it's a precision that would be useless to all but the most erudite readers.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#320

Post by netghost »

crazygringo wrote: post #307
slater wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

But is it a blog if it doesn't have an RSS feed?

…okay sure, technically yes, but not one I will be able to follow, or remember to read until it pops up in someone else's aggregator or links in the future.

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