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Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

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Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#331

Post by Gormo »

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?

The world's most popular podcast used to be The Joe Rogan Experience, but since Spotify acquired exclusive rights to it, it is no longer distributed as a podcast, and is only available as a Spotify channel. Despite continuing to call it a "podcast", it isn't actually a podcast anymore.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#332

Post by Gormo »

Klonoar wrote: post #324
Vrondi wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They are not ignorant just for holding a different opinion.

No, but this isn't a contest of opinions. The claim that RSS unsupported, no longer in widespread use, and/or is merely a remnant of a previous era is factually incorrect.

> don’t think it’s an invalid take to say that RSS is a thing of the past

Sorry, but it's an invalid take. I don't know what sites you're using that stopped offering RSS, but I have hundreds of blogs, podcasts, and aggregators, along with my favorite subrreddits, YouTube channels, etc. all subscribed via RSS, and the only time anything "dies" is when a blog or podcast changes its URL.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#333

Post by fabianholzer »

rsync wrote: post #315
amadeuspagel wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is an interesting format, but a bit hard to discover. If it would not have been for your comment, it would not have occurred to me, that there is a second level which enriches the overall topic.

Is it essential to the format to open all secondary parts at once? Otherwise that would be a great use case for the details/summary tag, which also would come with affordances that indicate that there is more information available.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#334

Post by Gormo »

zzo38computer wrote: post #304
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…

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.)

Most major websites continue to offer RSS. Considering that some people apparently believed that HN itself did not have RSS, I suspect that some people just don't know where to look for feed URLs.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#335

Post by layer8 »

pc86 wrote: post #327
layer8 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The problem is either (a) the scrollbar is hidden and the software doesn't allow to make it visible always or (b) the web page assumes there is no visible scrollbar (or, (c), only a "see-through" overlay scrollbar) even if there is one.

For additional aspects and details I refer you to these threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#337

Post by darekkay »

iamwil wrote: post #303

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.

Yes please! I always show a "published" date, but also a "last updated" date for my evergreen posts.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#338

Post by rsync »

fabianholzer wrote: post #333
rsync wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is an interesting format, but a bit hard to discover. If it would not have been for your comment, it would not have occurred to me, that there is a second level which enriches the overall topic. Is it essential to the format to open all secondary parts at once? Otherwise that would be a great use case for the details/summary tag, which also would come with affordances that indicate that there is more information a…

Thanks for that feedback - I will think about how to make the parts beyond the tip of the iceberg more obvious and discoverable. Philosophically, I want the "tip" to be as uncluttered as possible but ... we'll see what I can come up with.

Theoretically, if enough people began writing in this form it would then become obvious by virtue of familiarity ...

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#339

Post by neilv »

One not in this list that I find helpful: highlighting in code blocks.

For example, when you're showing a before and after, and want to highlight what changed. For example, I use it in the docs for: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/progedit/

The is one of the many features supported by Racket's Scribble, which is used to generate the online and print books for the Racket ecosystem. https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/ (Which I also used for API docs embedded inline in the code of various Racket packages I wrote.)

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#340

Post by scott_w »

dredmorbius wrote: post #322
elric wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 correctl…

To be fair, the designer of the website can’t restore scrollbars…
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