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?
See it
Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
361–370 of 444 posts
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#362Earlier 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.
ooi what's wrong with Simon Willison's site? I suspect my site would fall afoul of some of the taste around here but I didn't think Simon's was bad as far as they went.
I am a regular reader of Simon Willison. The content is fantastic but on mobile, I find the layout a bit confusing.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#363Earlier 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.
The "danluu layout" takes minimalism too far in my opinion, and getting in and out of some readability mode can be slow/annoying.
Just a lil bit of padding here and there could improve the presentation a lot, but I'm guessing the author consider this design kind of a trademark by now.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#364My most important microfeature is center-aligned pages. Whenever I read something on a large screen and the content is left-aligned, leaving a large gap on the right, it really turns me off. I try to make [mine]( https://rednafi.com ) center aligned on all clients.
> Whenever I read something on a large screen and the content is left-aligned, leaving a large gap on the right, it really turns me off. I’m curious, why do you find that an annoying? The alternative you’re advocating is ostensibly just shifting half that gap to the other side. If I were to be fussy about the gap then I’d be more interested if they were a layout that could make use of that space rather than alignment…
It’s mostly a personal quirk. I find text that are left aligned harder to read and immediately turn on the reader mode on the browser.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#365Anyone find a way to Group Series of Posts in Hugo? I would like to do this on my homepage instead of just having all posts without differentiation
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#366RedSails.org has a lot of very nice micro-features: * Tastefully displays the most relevant citation at the bottom of the screen as you read, e.g. see https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/ * Uses system light/dark UI settings. * Literally every article (with descriptions, author info, post date, etc) displayed on the homepage in chronological order with no pagination, great for ctrl-f, etc. * Selected authors…
> Tastefully displays the most relevant citation at the bottom of the screen as you read, e.g. see https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/
This is very nice; I think the same can be achieved with general footnotes (not just source links), though you'd have to be careful to keep them short lest you take up a lot of screen space.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#367For code blocks I created prism-remote. It’s a web component that highlights remote code snippets. Kinda like embedded gists but better, you can display snippets from any file in a repo: https://github.com/Fingel/prism-remote/blob/main/prism-remot... " start="1" end="10" lang="javascript" > https://github.com/Fingel/prism-remote
The idea is great, though I think I personally would prefer for this to happen on the server side (during rendering a static site, perhaps), not in the user's browsers. Particularly if the user doesn't enable JS, or has a slow connection.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#368Anyone find a way to Group Series of Posts in Hugo? I would like to do this on my homepage instead of just having all posts without differentiation
Taxonomies[0] are the way to go if you'd like to group content on your site by something like series (although you could "just" use tags, which Hugo enables out of the box). I use "series" as a taxonomy, for which an initial bit of code is here[1]. Given that, depending on how comfortable you are with Hugo templating, you could probably use `.Site.Taxonomies.series` to iterate over all the "series".
[0] https://gohugo.io/content-management/taxonomies/
[1] https://dev.danilafe.com/Web-Projects/blog-static/src/commit...
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#369Look at this graph of related articles on this blog, beautiful work https://blog.plasticlabs.ai/blog/YouSim;-Explore-The-Multive...
My site (OP) actually has a content graph as well, though it has a dedicated page. I didn't want to force users to run arbitrary JavaScript on every page just for aesthetics.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#370> 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…
Thank you for your thoughtful comment!
> But again, the page doesn't make use of the feature it is extolling the virtues of!
I said I loved the feature, not that I had the energy to implement it -- though I definitely should. :-)
> 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.
This is a good idea, and in my ideal world my site (and others) would support this, but it's more difficult to do automatically. Stitching together a series TOC and connecting sequences of articles is easier to automate.
> I'd stay away from an icon per target site/type though - that could quickly get confusing as you essentially have many icons for the same thing (an external link), and every site will use its own preferred set of icons, so the difference won't help generally identify things at a glance.
Yes, I'm not sure that I'd advocate for this in general. Another issue is that I personally get a little confused by some of the icons (what does "SAMA" stand for, if you don't know about OpenAI / Sam Altman already?).
> I'd like all articles to carry an obvious date of publishing and/or last update
Definitely, though as others in the comments have suggested, it may be that Google downranks pages like this. Not that I care much for my search ranking.