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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

#351

Post by p_l »

scott_w wrote: post #340
dredmorbius wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

... not exactly.

It's possible to essentially reimplement the logic of how scrollbars look, where they are, and when they appear, in just CSS on modern browsers.

Ended up having to do part of that once because it was easier at the time than to figure out just why a mismatched browser scrollbar would show up due to complex layouting issue (in embedded world, so we didn't actually have to worry about end user preference there, otherwise I wouldn't dare use such a hack)

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#352

Post by bookofjoe »

aworks wrote: post #328
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/

Seeing this: https://profile.typepad.com/rgable

made my day. Thank you for chiming in!!

So good to know there's at least one other Typepad user.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#353

Post by mkl »

patio11 wrote: post #311
andai wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234141833661440001.html

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#354

Post by Gormo »

Klonoar wrote: post #348
Gormo wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 hund…

> The claim that RSS unsupported, no longer in widespread use, and/or is merely a remnant of a previous era is factually incorrect. I did not say they were factually correct, merely that I'd lump RSS in with "things of the past" given how many sites and developers neglect it nowadays. I was pretty clearly saying that their opinion isn't unfathomable to me. The slow decline of RSS is not some new topic and this very s…

> I did not say they were factually correct, merely that I'd lump RSS in with "things of the past" given how many sites and developers neglect it nowadays.

I mean, I assume that number must be greater than zero, and yet I seem to be having a hard time identifying any sites or blogging applications that do indeed neglect RSS. All of the sites I frequent support it. Do you have any meaningful examples of this alleged lack of widespread RSS support?

> The slow decline of RSS is not some new topic

Unfortunately not -- people have been pretending it's happening for years without any real evidence to sustain the claim. If I were more of a conspiracy theorist, I'd suspect that maybe it's something they're trying to make happen.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#355

Post by crabmusket »

garof wrote: post #346
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.

For the lazy who don't know some of these: https://drewdevault.com https://fabiensanglard.net https://danluu.com Dan's is the only one I recall visiting before. And it's memorable because of the maximally wide text width. Personally I would find Dan's site more usable, and visitable, if there was an ordinary text width. Some reasonable default that is more readable.

Reader mode works great on danluu.com, as does a very simple user stylesheet along the lines of https://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#356

Post by zzo38computer »

082349872349872 wrote: post #267
dspillett wrote: post #187

> 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. This is unfortunately too often not the case, as people see fit to hide the default scrollbar and have something of their own that doesn't always show or is barely obvious. Though I agree with ToCs and showing progress that way, for pages long enough to make it useful rather tha…

> > Grouping Series of Posts > Yes, though I might argue that such links, or a link to a ToC page for the group, belong in a more general list of related links. Indeed, in the salad days of HTML there was some way to put related page-links in the , and Sir Tim's browser displayed UI that enabled navigation via them. Unfortunately that feature was already lost by the mid-1990s.

There is a command, although many of the possible link types seem to be ignored by common browsers; however, some of these can be used for as anyways.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#357

Post by zzo38computer »

jonahx wrote: post #257
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…

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…

That is a relevant point, although still it shouldn't be necessary; proper semantic HTML commands should allow the browser to handle it automatically (in the way subject to user preferences), e.g. the command can be used if you want to delimit the article from the comments, and with commands such as , , etc you can delimit sections and automatically make a table of contents.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#358

Post by crabmusket »

david2ndaccount wrote: post #271

Feels like many of these features should just be built into the browser. Why can’t the browser assemble a table of contents based on header hierarchy? Isn’t that the point of the number in h1-h6? Why aren’t elements with ids easy to link to by default? Add a “copy-link-to” to the standard context menu in the browser. Etc.

It feels like browsers over the decades have moved away from catering to power users.

Is something like Arc moving back? Without having used it (I plan to at some point), I've heard that at least its tab management seems catered towards "professional browser users".

I like the way Cory Doctorow puts it in this piece:

> A web browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a web-page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in it, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#re...

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#359

Post by Gormo »

trekz wrote: post #345
orhmeh09 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://openrss.org/open.spotify.com/show/4rOoJ6Egrf8K2Irywz...

OpenRSS is a service that creates RSS feeds using web scraping. Unfortunately, it can't create enclosure links for audio content that's sitting behind Spotify's paywall, so this isn't a podcast feed.

JRE simply isn't a podcast anymore. It's just a Spotify channel.

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