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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

#111

Post by xena »

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

They're called kaomoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaomoji (face-character)

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#113

Post by anal_reactor »

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's on purpose. You're supposed to browse the new content, not old one.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#114

Post by rat_on_the_run »

I don't like side notes. It tries to separate the readers to two groups---one who wants more details and the other who doesn't, but the problem is that there's no such natural division.

When I read articles with side notes, I often find myself constantly checking the side notes and then regret doing it because the info is unnecessary. I prefer the author to carefully think through and choose what info to present instead of just dumping info to the side notes.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#115

Post by xena »

voidUpdate wrote: post #13
dcminter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes a lot of skill on the part of the author - I don't think I'd risk it personally. But I like the way it's handled on fasterthanli.me enormously - the author there successfully anticipates a lot of my "wait, but..." thoughts and addresses them directly via this mechanism, or, conversely, makes me realise that I ought to have had an objection to the point they're making.

I've just read a couple of their articles, and I think an aside works nicely, just a note about something, but a full on dialog is a bit much. I suppose a lot of my concern was with how Xe Iaso does it, where it just feels over the top and unnecessary, and IMO distracts from the actual content of the article, which is otherwise largely enjoyable

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.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#116

Post by gary_0 »

bhaney wrote: post #107
baxtr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Way back when, we used to call ASCII like ":)" smilies, didn't we? I'm so old I don't even remember clearly. x_x

So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time...

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#117

Post by red_admiral »

I like most of these, but I'm on the fence about Link Preview. I find it gets in the way as often as it helps me. I end up triggering it by accident quite a bit, and especially the wikipedia version where there's no X in the corner to dismiss the preview can become annoying. The footnote pop-up bubble on substack can have the same problem.

On a slow and unreliable connection, it's also one more thing that I wish had a toggle to turn off.

Related to this, something I consider an anti-feature: any form of messing with a link to a different page that results in Control+Click not opening a new tab. Bonus negative points if you've scripted it to redirect the page in the current tab and there's no very good reason for it to be a single-page application (draw.io has a reason, the average blog does not).

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#118

Post by velcrovan »

mhb wrote: post #48
velcrovan wrote: post #36

I went pretty far in the direction of these features on my personal sites in the 2010s. They are fun coding and design challenges. Nowadays I am going the other direction. For the most recent design on my personal site, I even have a “no footnotes” rule, on the theory that (for me at least) footnotes can be an indication of scattered thinking and/or insufficient editing.

Nicholson Baker would like a word.

We were mutuals on Twitter, alas

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#119

Post by superkuh »

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.

The for-profit web surfs the eternal wave of "now". Anything that happened in the past is disregarded by search indexes, social media, and people using them.

Re: Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

#120

Post by juliushuijnk »

bhaney wrote: post #107
baxtr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is this part supposed to represent?

︵ ┻━┻

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