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Re:Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites by rednafi on Monday June 24, 2024 @01:18PM (#40778550)
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.

Re:Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites by gnicholas on Monday June 24, 2024 @02:37PM (#40779301)
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?
Re:Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites by elevatedastalt on Monday June 24, 2024 @04:08PM (#40780114)
Dan's website is a great example of the pendulum swinging in the other direction to malicious non-conformism. Yes, UXers have made modern web design hell, but presenting a raw unstyled html isn't respecting your user much either.
Re:Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites by zelphirkalt on Monday June 24, 2024 @04:21PM (#40780255)
I think that is not so simple to solve. Limit it to some column width? Someone will complain that it only uses one third of their screen. Unlimited width? Someone will complain about whole width text. But the good thing is, that there is reader mode and evem if there wasn't, you could zoom in or resize the browser window or send to new window and resoze only that.
Re:Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites by gnicholas on Monday June 24, 2024 @04:37PM (#40780448)
Yeah, most browsers do have reader mode now. I honestly don't love them because they're typically not customizable, and are sometimes too narrow for my taste.

I wouldn't mind resizing the browser window except that with tabbed systems that means you're resizing all of the tabs at the same time.

I tend to think that if you make the width something in the neighborhood of what the NYT, Medium, or other well-known sites use, people won't complain. But I could be wrong!

Re:Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites by zelphirkalt on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @07:10PM (#40794751)
Firefox reader mode is a little bit customizable. Font size column width and so.

Cumbersome, but one can change width of a single tab by using the inspector and using the responsive design mode.

Perhaps there is room for another Firefox feature to limit width of a page. Perhaps multi-column mode, where one can for example split the page in 3 columns and each column displays, what could not be fit on the previous column. And resizable columns maybe.

Re:Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites by account42 on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @10:21AM (#40788999)
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 by hollerith on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @10:24AM (#40789037)
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 by reitanuki on Monday June 24, 2024 @03:06PM (#40779549)
ooi what's wrong with Simon Willison's site?

I suspect my site would fall afoul of some of the taste around here but I didn't think Simon's was bad as far as they went.

Re:Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites by rednafi on Monday June 24, 2024 @07:53PM (#40782546)
I am a regular reader of Simon Willison. The content is fantastic but on mobile, I find the layout a bit confusing.
Re:Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites by garof on Monday June 24, 2024 @05:40PM (#40781140)
For the lazy who don't know some of these:

https://drewdevault.com

https://fabiensanglard.net

https://danluu.com

Dan's is the only one I recall visiting before. And it's memorable because of the maximally wide text width. Personally I would find Dan's site more usable, and visitable, if there was an ordinary text width. Some reasonable default that is more readable.

Re:Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites by emmanueloga_ on Monday June 24, 2024 @07:54PM (#40782557)
The "danluu layout" takes minimalism too far in my opinion, and getting in and out of some readability mode can be slow/annoying.

Just a lil bit of padding here and there could improve the presentation a lot, but I'm guessing the author consider this design kind of a trademark by now.

Re:Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites by crabmusket on Monday June 24, 2024 @06:34PM (#40781807)
Reader mode works great on danluu.com, as does a very simple user stylesheet along the lines of https://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com