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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

#321

Post by zelphirkalt »

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?

I think that is not so simple to solve. Limit it to some column width? Someone will complain that it only uses one third of their screen. Unlimited width? Someone will complain about whole width text. But the good thing is, that there is reader mode and evem if there wasn't, you could zoom in or resize the browser window or send to new window and resoze only that.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#322

Post by dredmorbius »

elric wrote: post #220
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 progress bars are a logical consequence of the user-hostile shrinking of the scrollbar. Unusable, narrow things which are often hidden by default, and rarely have a visible elevator (or thumb) anymore. Of course, scrollbars are often entirely useless in pages which insist on loading content piecemeal -- another user hostile pattern.

Obvious solution is obvious: restore the fucking scrollbar.

I suspect a strong driver of scrollbar deprecation is the overwhelming dominance of small-screen touch-based mobile devices. An active scrollbar, that is, one which not only shows page scroll depth, but controls it via touch, is one more UI element to generate annoying behaviours given the already perilous state of touch-based UIs. (The inability to correctly distinguish tap vs. drag or scroll actions is one that's driven me to distraction for well over a decade.)

Unfortunately, what's at least arguable on mobile becomes the trendy fashion on desktop, which is just fucking stupid.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#323

Post by dredmorbius »

mschuster91 wrote: post #236
gessha wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, pages sometimes have comments or footers or other bells and whistles after the content that I’m interested in and it makes me think the post is longer than it is. This leads me to either leave the post for later or straight up close it because it’s too long.

> To add to this, pages sometimes have comments or footers or other bells and whistles after the content that I’m interested in Or, especially in news sites, Taboola and other bottom feeder trash.

uBlock Origin's element blocker is ideal for removing those. You can define global rules for anything from Taboola, Outbrain, RevContent, etc., and never see them again.

"Sharedaddy" is another element to nuke (social link litter crap).

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#324

Post by Klonoar »

Vrondi wrote: post #181
xnorswap wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

WHOA! This is shocking ignorance for an HN user. RSS still exists for most of the web if you can be bothered to use it. It just isn't in your face anymore. I consume a lot of content through RSS to this day. You also don't need to look at those email adverts if you can be bothered to use real email apps. It's your choice to soak yourself in the dumbed down garbage interfaces.

They are not ignorant just for holding a different opinion.

My entire reading system is built on RSS but I don’t think it’s an invalid take to say that RSS is a thing of the past, or at the very least that the train has left the station. Every month I have some feed just randomly die because nobody paid attention or cares anymore. It’s pretty unfortunate.

Browsers should never have backed off exposing it, IMO.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#325

Post by DylanSp »

One nice thing I've seen is separating out footnotes (additional comments) from references (citations/links to external contents). It's probably not applicable to all blogs, but I like it in Citation Needed, Molly White's blog/newsletter; see https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-60/ as an example.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#326

Post by gnicholas »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #321
gnicholas wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think that is not so simple to solve. Limit it to some column width? Someone will complain that it only uses one third of their screen. Unlimited width? Someone will complain about whole width text. But the good thing is, that there is reader mode and evem if there wasn't, you could zoom in or resize the browser window or send to new window and resoze only that.

Yeah, most browsers do have reader mode now. I honestly don't love them because they're typically not customizable, and are sometimes too narrow for my taste.

I wouldn't mind resizing the browser window except that with tabbed systems that means you're resizing all of the tabs at the same time.

I tend to think that if you make the width something in the neighborhood of what the NYT, Medium, or other well-known sites use, people won't complain. But I could be wrong!

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#327

Post by pc86 »

layer8 wrote: post #255
pc86 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not either of these is user-hostile is up to interpretation and preference, but you're stating it as if it is objective fact. You see user-hostile shrinking of the scrollbar, someone else sees more room for content and hiding something that isn't necessary until you need it. You see loading content piecemeal as hostile, someone else sees blocking that 1kb of text from being displayed while you do more netw…

Regarding scrollbars, it’s user-hostile if the user can’t control it according to their preference.

What can't you do on a scrollbar today that you could 10/20/30 years ago?

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#328

Post by aworks »

bookofjoe wrote: post #237

I celebrate the 20th anniversary of my 365 days/year Typepad blog on August 20, 2024. For a long, long time it's appeared to me that I'm the last person on Earth still using Typepad, which since it started being bought and sold a decade or so ago has had gradual serious decrements in speed and functionality. It takes on average 10 seconds to upload a photo, and usually 2-3 attempts because of broken links. Many times…

I still pay for my Typepad account but have only blogged sporadically for the last decade. I haven't particularly noticed any degredation of its capabilities but I haven't paid much attention to it either.

I did revise the template and looking at it now, it seems rather ugly :-)

https://rgable.typepad.com/aworks/

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#329

Post by facundo_olano »

misternugget wrote: post #291

One mini-feature I really like: authors highlighting their own favorite or popular articles. 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.

I second this. I wrote a post around this idea of non chronological blog archiving https://olano.dev/blog/web-anthologists

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#330

Post by baxtr »

jevogel wrote: post #144
baxtr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

These are called kaomoji. More generally, emoticons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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