Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

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.