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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

#401

Post by account42 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #347
slater wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And how the heck am I supposed to find that next post? Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed?

> Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed? Which has the 10 or 20 most recent posts, but not the post from 12 years ago. If it's a wordpress blog, you can use pagination tricks to get older posts, but, AFAIK, there's no standard way to say "Give me all of the posts" when fetching the RSS feed.

It is possible for feeds to support pagination and archives in a standardized manner: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005#section-3

Not very common though in my experience.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#402

Post by account42 »

crazygringo wrote: post #307
slater wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And how the heck am I supposed to find that next post? Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed?

These days an awful lot of blogs don't have RSS feeds. Especially blogs that are part of broader news publications, in my experience. But yes you're right when there is a feed you can open that in Chrome and Ctrl+F, at least. (Obviously my complaints come from blogs that don't have this. But also, opening an XML file isn't exactly user-friendly, and 99% of end users would never know to do it.)

> These days an awful lot of blogs don't have RSS feeds.

That's not my experience.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#403

Post by xena »

voidUpdate wrote: post #385
xena wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a very hard thing to calibrate. I try to have my internal conflicts and the like get put onto the canvas. I imagine that part of the perceived distraction is because of the CSS being bad (I suck at CSS so much). I'll go dig through a few Tailwind examples and see if I can make the messages more compact.

Well I didn't expect you to actually read this haha. I hope I didn't cause any offence, I just struggle to keep your wide character roster in my head with all their specialised roles. The only reason I mentioned you specifically was because I was familiar with you as an example and the source mentioned you, I'm sure others do this to an even larger extent

Yeah, I try to compensate for this with a few rules that I undoubtedly fuck up:

* Each character has very visually distinct designs (ideally each is as distinct as I can reasonably make them, to the point where I have different artists do each one)

* The names have meaning (Aoi means blue, Aoi's hair is blue)

* Each character has an archetype that corresponds to a facet of how I understand technology, and their interactions are intended to reflect those internal disagreements or touch on the intentionally placed "learning lies" (the simplifications of how things work intended to give people a starting point for understanding an abstract thing that can later be discarded when they dig into the details and realize that shit's actually complicated)

I've been idly considering adding something to the message footer in faint text with a tl;dr like "(the student)" for Aoi, or "(the well-intentioned forum troll)" for Numa. Would that help?

I originally was kinda hesitant to do this under the axiom that if you have to explain your art, you fucked it up. I'm willing to concede that it's probably a bad axiom for me to follow here.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#404

Post by account42 »

xigoi wrote: post #389
squidbeak wrote: post #29

RSS should be a core rather than a 'micro' feature.

Unfortunately, it only supports a limited subset of HTML.

That's OK though - it should be enough for text content. I think it's also OK to just have the RSS feed contain the title and summary of the article since I prefer to read the content in my browser anyway - but there are definitely different opinions here.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#405

Post by account42 »

Vrondi wrote: post #185
afiori wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a good guide on how to implement basic RSS functionality?

Most CMS/blog apps have it built in. You might need to look up how to enable it (Drupal) or you might already have it enabled, even if you don't realize it (Wordpress). Check the documentation for your blogging/site content framework of choice. If you're super old school and do an actual manual HTML site, just create the RSS file and add entries to it, then link to it. This is well documented and not in any way compl…

> If you're super old school and do an actual manual HTML site, just create the RSS file and add entries to it, then link to it.

Make use to add an element and not just a normal hyperlink so that users can just paste your blog URL into their feed reader to subscribe without having to search for the feed link. Ideally this should be present in the page for both the index as well as every article.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#406

Post by account42 »

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?

What would be the reason for choosing a browser width wider than what you can comfortably read?

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#407

Post by hollerith »

account42 wrote: post #406
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?

What would be the reason for choosing a browser width wider than what you can comfortably read?

Huh: my browser is always maximized (the width of my monitor) as are all the other apps I regularly use -- similar to how an iPad worked before iPadOS introduced multitasking -- but then I'm scaling the UI by a factor of 200% and its not a HiDPI monitor, just a humble 1080p one, so the effective horizontal resolution of my browser's viewport is 960 pixels. At that resolution, line of text on danluu.com and in comment sections on HN are longer than I would prefer them to be, but they're not so long as to be a significant annoyance.

Back when I used an OS that didn't let me scale the UI, I'd occasionally make the browser window narrower to make the lines of text on a site more reasonable, but I definitely appreciated it when sites made it unnecessary for me to do that, by specifying body {max-width: 45em;} or something.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#408

Post by wegfawefgawefg »

mey wrote: post #165
paulddraper wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get less than a quarter the speed of dialup?

Some potential reasons - Remote backhaul / Satellite / Offshore - Subsidized/cheap wireless plan - Going over data cap, some carriers fall into a "safety" mode instead of charging you extra. I pay for 8gb/mo and would get throttled to similar speeds - Preference

My brand new OnePlus8pro was blacklisted in Japan for being under the oppo brand a couple years ago. (The system in japan works on whitelisting, its corrupt and stupid) Anyways I had a $1000 phone, and I was not about to throw it away. So I continued to use it via an American cell company, which gives me just enough internet for wikipedia. Google maps doesnt work about 70% of the time. Since then I have realized not having good internet is good for my brain. It keeps me reading gigamonkeys and downloading pdf's before I go places rather than doomscrolling twitter.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#409

Post by wegfawefgawefg »

aklemm wrote: post #158
wegfawefgawefg wrote: post #152

I 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.

Phone might have a power button which would help you meet your goal.

My phone mostly functions as a text machine with encyclopedia attached, which I greatly enjoy. When I see unusual construction or some curiosities I do not understand, I look them up. angle-of-repose, hill reinforcement techniques, average lifespan of whale shark, salps, concrete blocks underneath vending machines, stacked wires on electric trains, staged turbos on desiel trains, those circular dimples in japanese concrete blocks, etc. This is what I have always mostly used the internet for. After reading about something like this I enjoy just stewing on the info. This is the mode of existence I enjoy the most.

Only in the past few years was there much temptation for forever scrolling. Turning off my phone is good but then I cant look up interesting stuff, which is the point of being alive for me.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#410

Post by account42 »

WD-42 wrote: post #198

For 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

Your example makes the same mistake as the one in the article - linking to a (development) branch rather than a specific commit. Unless it is just example code written for the article (in which case why link to it) stuff is eventually going to move arount and your referenced line numbers will be stale.
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