By the way, thanks very much for the suggestions!
Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
371–380 of 444 posts
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Here's another active blog on Typepad https://www.therestisnoise.com/
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#373While I heartily agree with nearly all of the suggestions here - particularly ToC and Code Blocks With Origin (which I really should implement on my own website) - FWIW, I disagree on the need for Progress Bars and Dialogues.
Progress Bars seem like an eyesore to me, a distracting visual feature that's trying to goad me into finishing the article. As other commenters mentioned, the browser already has a scroll bar, which indicates the amount of content I have read. A progress bar just seems unnecessary.
As for dialogues - while they can be cute and interesting if done well, it usually just gets in the way of the content I'm trying to read. The problem that it solves - "ask[ing] questions from a less-experienced point of view" - can often be accomplished with regular prose instead eg. "But you might be asking..."
A feature that I'd like to see in more blogs is a 'Tech Stack' page[0]. I've often stumbled on websites that look very appealing, but have no description of how they were created. This page would describe the technologies and tools you use to write your website. Things like static site generators, CSS, JS framework (if any) could go in here.
I'd also like to add 'Site Maps'[1] to this, which I've implemented as a list of all articles on my website.
[0]: I have such a page at https://twomorecents.org/tech-stack.html
[1]: Looks like this has already been mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40778888
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#374One micro feature I implement on my blog that I would like to see everywhere: a single-page index of all the posts, like at https://blog.zorinaq.com Don't paginate this. I want to see at a glance the titles of all the posts the author wrote. I want to be able to ctrl-f to search these titles. Heck, even if you had 100k titles they could still easily be shown on one page, as it would compress to 1 or 2MB transmitted o…
> like at https://blog.zorinaq.com
2013, Bitcoin hits $1k: https://blog.zorinaq.com/1-bitcoin-1000-us-dollars/ "Sure a crash that would bring it back down to below $1,000 is possible or likely, but it would not change its long-term prospect, a few years from now, from being valued between $5,000 and $50,000 and possibly more."
from then, 4 years to $5k, 8 years to $50k.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#375What if there were a standard object that everybody rendered to their taste? To some, these are nice features, to others it's just bloat that causes a 5mb download for 1kb of text.
Yes, although HTML is rather messy. It is why some people use Gopher, had made up Gemini and Scorpion file formats too. (You can also serve multiple protocols and file formats if you want to do.)
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#376I hate all of these features except the index. I get about 12kbps on mobile. There are very few sites I can view. Hackers news is one of them. The more I use the modern internet the more I want to be left alone with my thoughts. I need th website equivalent of a sensorial faraday cage.
I actually agree with you, even though my Internet isn't as slow. Can you do me a favor and go to my website? If you do, please give me feedback about what you like and don't like. Thank you. https://gavinhoward.com/
The first page took a while to load, about 8 seconds. But the articles loaded much more quickly. A few seconds each.
I am in asia so depending on where you are hosting some of this might be initial latency, which is often pretty high.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#377Most of these ux enhancements should be browser addons, in my view. We have gone way beyond what a website should be responsible for versus what’s up to the reader experience to implement.
I agree; the website should not need to be responsible for most of this stuff (and even when it is, the way it works is too messy). (In some cases the document author would still need to specify, e.g. the IDs of headings so that they can be referred to in URLs, but the browser should handle the rest; the author should not also need to add links in the headers.) The table of contents might even be suitable as a built-in feature. Having a progress indicator for only the article and not comments would be possible by using the standard command; a browser might choose to (subject to user settings) display a progress bar or scroll bar for the article only. The user can disable the features that they do not want (and/or change the features that they want differently). (Some people will use other file formats and protocols to try to improve this; and, if you like to do, you can even make available multiple protocols and file formats)
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#378Since 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.
> 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.
As a web developer, I often look at the HTML and CSS of interesting websites…
I gotta say, I've never seen anything quite like https://gwern.net.
It's an impressive looking site IMHO; but pretty much everything he's done is very user hostile and wasteful of the user's resources, like downloading 14 fonts.
He's doing everything you're not supposed to do if you care about your users or performance in general.
Every page is pretty much like this.
From cssstats.com:
Rules: 1,484
Selectors: 1,757
Declarations: 3,914
Properties: 243
Total Selectors by Type
Selectors are the part of a CSS ruleset that describes what elements in a document the rule will match.
ID: 534
Class: 1,516
Pseudo Class: 296
Pseudo Element: 382
It just goes on and on like this.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually agree with you, even though my Internet isn't as slow. Can you do me a favor and go to my website? If you do, please give me feedback about what you like and don't like. Thank you. https://gavinhoward.com/
The first page took a while to load, about 8 seconds. But the articles loaded much more quickly. A few seconds each. I am in asia so depending on where you are hosting some of this might be initial latency, which is often pretty high.
Thank you!
They are hosted in the States, and I can't afford a CDN, unfortunately. But I made sure to split off the CSS and other assets so they could be cached. It seems to have helped.
Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Ahh that’s fair. I have a few of their quirks myself, like the font being too large or too small.