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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 thi

by breck 2y ago

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" to ".txt" to view it as plain text (https://breckyunits.com/intelligence.txt https://breckyunits.com/intelligence.txt). Makes it easy to copy/paste a whole post into an email or Reddit submission - View source links at the bottom of every page. Every post is 1 file tracked by git, and I put a "View source" link at the bottom of each page. Even the static pages are also one file, and also have a View Source link. - Clientside full text search - https://breckyunits.com/search.html https://breckyunits.com/search.html. - CSV export. In addition to RSS, you can download my site as CSV (https://breckyunits.com/posts.csv https://breckyunits.com/posts.csv). - Keyboard nav. Use the left/right arrow keys to navigate through pages on my site. - 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 https://breckyunits.com/pcr.html - Download entire site and read offline. Everything is designed to work fine locally and you can download the whole thing as a zip. (The link is at the bottom of every page) - Printable. Everything is designed to look decent printed. Nav elements are hidden via CSS when you go to print. I haven't added automatic generation of PDFS yet, but that is on my todo.

jsnell 2y ago
> - Keyboard nav. Use the left/right arrow keys to navigate through pages on my site. Please don't, this is horrible and I've previously only seen it used by clickbait news sites. It provides no real value, the only use case of somebody wanting to browse through just the start of each of your articles is going to be incredibly rare. But what you're doing is hijacking a key that normally has no effect into having a destructive one. All it takes is a minor keyboard fumble while trying to scroll, and you've just lost all context and confusingly taken to some totally unrelated article.
- breck 2y ago
  In theory is the same as in practice, in theory. But in practice, they're different. > It provides no real value, This is wrong. It provides a tremendous amount of value. Source: I use it many times a week, for many years, for many reasons. > destructive one. This is wrong. These pages are immutable with no state. If by chance you accidentally hit an arrow key on one of the rare long form pages with scroll, sure you lose about 50 milliseconds of time getting back to your prior scroll level. In years of doing this not a single person has ever complained, while instead a number have commented that they like it.
  - destructionator 2y ago
    > In years of doing this not a single person has ever complained I've never used your website, but if I did and the side arrow changed things, I'd immediately close it and never come back. You wouldn't get a complaint from me; you'd just lose me instantly and permanently. It drives me absolutely nuts when sites do this, it is so disorienting.
    - breck 2y ago
      > I'd immediately close it and never come back. You wouldn't get a complaint from me; you'd just lose me instantly and permanently. Do you think this concerns me? I don't make this site for you, someone who admits they've "never used" my site. I make my site for my regular readers, some of whom have been reading the site for over 10 years. The people who regularly email me comments and feedback on my posts. People who _love_ the fact that they can flip through the entire blog in seconds using the arrow keys. > when sites do this My site is not like other sites on the web. In fact, it is such an outlier, that I've recently started a new successor to the WWW, called the World Wide Scroll, to start aggregating more sites like mine. My site is entirely public domain, has no advertising or trackers or cookies, can be downloaded in 1 click and used entirely offline, is written in a new language (Scroll) that is mathematically shown to be the simplest/most powerful language yet invented, that compiles to HTML/CSS/JSON/XML/RSS/plain text, is fully tracked by git so you can see the history of every line in every file.
vedranm 2y ago
> - 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 https://breckyunits.com/pcr.html Very neat! Many other are cool too.

by breck 2y ago

jsnell 2y ago

> - Keyboard nav. Use the left/right arrow keys to navigate through pages on my site. Please don't, this is horrible and I've previously only seen it used by clickbait news sites. It provides no real value, the only use case of somebody wanting to browse through just the start of each of your articles is going to be incredibly rare. But what you're doing is hijacking a key that normally has no effect into having a destructive one. All it takes is a minor keyboard fumble while trying to scroll, and you've just lost all context and confusingly taken to some totally unrelated article.

breck 2y ago
In theory is the same as in practice, in theory. But in practice, they're different. > It provides no real value, This is wrong. It provides a tremendous amount of value. Source: I use it many times a week, for many years, for many reasons. > destructive one. This is wrong. These pages are immutable with no state. If by chance you accidentally hit an arrow key on one of the rare long form pages with scroll, sure you lose about 50 milliseconds of time getting back to your prior scroll level. In years of doing this not a single person has ever complained, while instead a number have commented that they like it.
- destructionator 2y ago
  > In years of doing this not a single person has ever complained I've never used your website, but if I did and the side arrow changed things, I'd immediately close it and never come back. You wouldn't get a complaint from me; you'd just lose me instantly and permanently. It drives me absolutely nuts when sites do this, it is so disorienting.
  - breck 2y ago
    > I'd immediately close it and never come back. You wouldn't get a complaint from me; you'd just lose me instantly and permanently. Do you think this concerns me? I don't make this site for you, someone who admits they've "never used" my site. I make my site for my regular readers, some of whom have been reading the site for over 10 years. The people who regularly email me comments and feedback on my posts. People who _love_ the fact that they can flip through the entire blog in seconds using the arrow keys. > when sites do this My site is not like other sites on the web. In fact, it is such an outlier, that I've recently started a new successor to the WWW, called the World Wide Scroll, to start aggregating more sites like mine. My site is entirely public domain, has no advertising or trackers or cookies, can be downloaded in 1 click and used entirely offline, is written in a new language (Scroll) that is mathematically shown to be the simplest/most powerful language yet invented, that compiles to HTML/CSS/JSON/XML/RSS/plain text, is fully tracked by git so you can see the history of every line in every file.

vedranm 2y ago

> - 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 https://breckyunits.com/pcr.html Very neat! Many other are cool too.