Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

danilafe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 444 posts

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#101

Post by vedranm »

breck wrote: post #4

Oh this is a great list. Thank you. A few things on here that I'm now going to spend the day bringing to my site. I like how you explicitly called out a few things Gwern does. I love that site but hadn't examined closely _why_. Here is a few additional things not on your list that I love and have implemented on my blog: - Plain text versions of all posts. Change the file extension on any page on my site from ".html"…

> - Helpful 404s. If you mistype a url, the 404 page compares it to working urls and shows you the closest match. All done using clientside JS (no web server needed). For example: https://breckyunits.com/pcr.html

Very neat! Many other are cool too.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#102

Post by OptionOfT »

pocketarc wrote: post #73
Puts wrote: post #47

A feature that seems to have disappeared from a lot of blogs these days is date when a post was published. Sometimes date is required to put things into context and I can't understand why so many blogs these days don't have it.

Others have commented on it being SEO-related, but I think there might be a psychological component to it as well, where you don’t want people to bounce because they think it’s an old and irrelevant article.

I've experienced this before. Titles with '(YEAR)' which are auto updated. And 'FIXED!'.

And it ends up being an ad for some service.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#103

Post by mbforbes »

hypertexthero wrote: post #55

Good list, though here comes my Hacker News-style pesky comment: Justified text on a screen is a feature that makes my eyes and brain hurt. Ragged text is much easier to read. Uneven and beautiful, like a plant whose details you rest your eyes upon as you observe, rather than a uniform concrete structure where vision is lost. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)

Agreed! I wrote a blog post about this a couple years back.[1] A few things I think are going on:

- layout and hyphenation algorithms on the web are worse (or often disabled!)

- the lines are often too long

- the site's margins aren't as strong as with print design

These factors combine to produce the mess you're describing.

I've spent so much time reading justified text in print that I do like it in general. But I think until places like NYT or Medium adopt it on their websites, it's probably not up to snuff on the web.

(edit: formatting)

[1] https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/web-justified-text/

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#104

Post by baxtr »

hypertexthero wrote: post #55

Good list, though here comes my Hacker News-style pesky comment: Justified text on a screen is a feature that makes my eyes and brain hurt. Ragged text is much easier to read. Uneven and beautiful, like a plant whose details you rest your eyes upon as you observe, rather than a uniform concrete structure where vision is lost. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)

Meta comment: that’s the third comment I see this week with “quasi” emojis. Is this becoming a trend?

o_o

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#105

Post by rchaud »

xnorswap wrote: post #50
squidbeak wrote: post #29

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

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…

In this case "moving on" means adding in social media "share beacons", which just so happens to load their 3rd party cookies and analytics scripts, and shuttle that web traffic information back to the motherships.

No thanks. I'll stick to RSS.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#106

Post by zerkten »

83457 wrote: post #49
Puts wrote: post #47

A feature that seems to have disappeared from a lot of blogs these days is date when a post was published. Sometimes date is required to put things into context and I can't understand why so many blogs these days don't have it.

It is related to SEO.

And so much of the SEO voodoo is then codified into templates which get reused over and over again.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#107

Post by bhaney »

baxtr wrote: post #104
hypertexthero wrote: post #55

Good list, though here comes my Hacker News-style pesky comment: Justified text on a screen is a feature that makes my eyes and brain hurt. Ragged text is much easier to read. Uneven and beautiful, like a plant whose details you rest your eyes upon as you observe, rather than a uniform concrete structure where vision is lost. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)

Meta comment: that’s the third comment I see this week with “quasi” emojis. Is this becoming a trend? o_o

> (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

> o_o

> “quasi” emojis

Welp, if you need me I'll be shuffling my weary bones into a casket.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#108

Post by mbforbes »

Since 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.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#109

Post by zerkten »

hamasho wrote: post #54

It's not a feature, but I like websites without sticky headers or footers. I hate seeing it on mobile, but I don't like it even on desktop. The worst is the sticky side button overlapping the main content. A few years ago, I sometimes saw "share on social media" buttons obscuring the article, and that was so annoying.

I think that is a good default. A small number of sites seem to execute sticky elements that help with long content, but only add it if you are going to test it.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#110

Post by ahmetsait »

zoidb wrote: post #11

> Easily Linkable Headings I haven't found a nice way to do this on both desktop/mobile. What I want is for every heading to have an anchor link that can be copied, similar to a hyperlink. I see a lot of sites do this with a [unicode chain symbol] which is present on hover, but that's not an option on mobile. Alternate option is to have it next to every heading (ugly), turn every heading into a hyperlink without styl…

I don't think it looks that bad. My blog's anchors are hover-visible on desktop and always visible on mobile (with lower opacity). I used this query to check for hover event availability to decide whether they should be always-visible: `@media screen and (hover: none)`. I think it turned out pretty ok¹.

[1]: https://ahmetsait.com/blog/en/Hello-World

Post reply on HN