Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
Small design touches on blogs—such as tables of contents, linkable headings, sidenotes, progress bars, and estimated reading times—can make long-form web content easier to navigate and share, but readers disagree on which of these actually help versus distract or bloat pages. Commenters praise features that improve structure, printability, offline use, RSS access, clear dates, and simple site-wide indexes, while criticizing intrusive elements like auto-opening dialogs, link previews, keybinding hijacks, sticky headers, and heavy JavaScript/CSS. A recurring theme is whether such behavior should live in individual sites or in browsers and protocols, alongside a broader tension between minimalist, fast pages and highly instrumented reading experiences.
Dialogues and narrative gimmicks
- Mixed reactions to inline dialogues with fictional characters in technical writing.
- Some find them engaging when they anticipate reader objections; others see them as distracting, hard to follow, and more for the author’s amusement than the reader’s.
- Simpler Q&A or FAQ-style asides are often preferred. Good execution is seen as rare and high-skill.
Progress indicators vs scrollbars
- Debate over page progress bars: fans say they help when pages have long footers, comments, or infinite scroll where the native scrollbar misleads.
- Critics find them redundant, visually noisy, or “re-implementing the scrollbar badly.”
- Underlying complaint: modern OS/browser scrollbars are tiny or auto-hidden, pushing sites to reinvent them.
Tables of contents, headings, and anchors
- Strong support for ToCs on long/technical posts; seen as overkill or distracting on short/essay-style pieces.
- Several patterns mentioned: side ToC that highlights current section (“scroll spy”), collapsible ToC, or dedicated ToC pages.
- Many want every heading to be linkable, with small anchor icons and/or copy-to-clipboard; mobile-friendly CSS patterns are discussed.
Footnotes, sidenotes, and asides
- Highly divisive: some love rich sidenotes and footnotes (citing specific blogs as inspiration), others see them as clutter or evidence of undisciplined writing.
- Mobile handling is a recurring problem; some favor details/summary blocks or pure footnotes that always work in narrow layouts and RSS.
RSS, dates, and longevity
- Many argue RSS is still widely used and essential, not a “microfeature” or dead technology. Others feel it’s neglected or in slow decline.
- Strong consensus that visible publish/update dates are crucial context; anger at blogs that hide them for SEO or marketing reasons.
- Some use multiple dates (start, first publish, last modified); URL-embedded dates can confuse readers without explanation.
Link previews and external markers
- Interest in per-site link icons and hover previews, but also concern about privacy (unwanted requests), mobile usability, and “UI land mines.”
- Some like previews only when they genuinely save a click by summarizing the target.
Other appreciated or disliked microfeatures
- Liked: plain-text versions, good print CSS/PDFs, helpful 404s with suggestions, single-page indices of all posts, blogrolls/webrings, “start here” and favorites pages, client-side search, comments bridged from the fediverse.
- Disliked: hijacking keyboard arrows for navigation, sticky headers/footers, auto-open comments, left-aligned narrow columns on wide screens, justified text on the web, and JS-heavy “overengineered” blogs that hurt performance, especially on mobile.
- Several argue many of these features should be browser-level (ToC from headings, better scroll indicators) rather than bespoke per site.