Please, for your reader's sake, spend 30 mins making these changes to your blog | Hacker News Reader

Please, for your reader's sake, spend 30 mins making these changes to your blog

shanerostad.com

1 pointShanerostad10 comments

"The worst offense I see around the web is super tiny font sizes."

Yes! So much so that I've been forcing 16pt DejaVu for everything for years and it makes the web so much nicer that it is worth the annoyance of working around sites that it breaks. Every time I use a default profile browser I cringe at how small most text on the web is. I would use pt rather than px but I guess it doesn't matter in CSS (and em/rem when possible as your link suggests).

I don't mind wide text that much, but I agree it is usually better to limit the width. Similarly, your image suggestions seem like good defaults. It would be great if more people followed most of these suggestions.

The one I really disagree with is featured image being a must. There are way too many useless images on the top of posts (and sometimes inside posts also) just for the sake of having an image. My local newspaper is the worst at this, where I often look at several stories a day with the same (sometimes misleading) stock image, but lots of blog posts do the same thing (including this one). Wost is like this one where the useless large stock image is in the blog header.

I would also add no popups or fixed headers or footers. Don't pop up share icons anywhere (this page provides a good example why not :(). Just leave the share icons at the bottom. Follower side bars are often annoying (particularly when they have share icons) but occasionally useful and at least don't obstruct anything on a larger display.

I think it is good that you can set your own preference for font size rather than that being defined by the webpage designer; my own preference is much smaller than 16pt. I also dislike the narrow page width, and prefer it to fill the window; it should be the user's job to set their own preferences (there are browser extensions to apply your own CSS to webpages; I use this to alter the styles of many webpages, including even Hacker News).

I generally design webpages with no CSS at all (and no scripts either); it can use whatever preferences the user has set in the browser configuration, instead.

I agree there are too many useless images. I say: do not include any images at all unless it is a major part of the article. Stock images are not helpful. (Again, I sometimes use CSS to suppress them.)

I agree with you no popups, no fixed headers/footers/sidebars, no popup share icons. (Many kinds of share icons should be outside of the scope of the document anyways; you do not need to include them at all. The user can use a browser extension or bookmarklet or something to do sharing if wanted. Anyways, the document author does not necessarily know what the user wants to share, with whom, and how.)

I agree share icons (at least for off site sharing) shouldn't really exist at all in web pages, although I think it would be a good idea for browsers to have a share function integrated so that you could add a new share option similar to how new search options can be easily added with one click. At least one of the many benefits of the blocking I use is no share icons.

The hard thing is, most people aren't programmers, nor do they know you can set your own preferences. With this topic I tend to think of building things for the lowest common denominator.

Again, the sharing icons seem to be annoying so that's something I'll take into account.

You're right, the featured image is usually terrible for most blogs. Thanks for the feedback on the share icons - definitely annoying and will tone them back on mobile + images.

Just because there might be bloggers out there reading this looking to improve things - SHOW ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATES! This is especially critical for tech blogs.

I think the user's own settings should be used, and they don't need to worry about that. If you want it wide or less wide, to resize the window. Many webpages use CSS and often I have to correct them by applying my own CSS on my side, but some webpages do not use CSS and they are usually OK without needing any CSS added. And yet, often just plain text is OK you do not even need HTML.

Not all content is the same an it is annoying to keep resizing windows (which is why I use the ratpoison window manager). I wish it was easier for the user to indicate with preferences, but I'm not sure if there is a good way to do that right now.

I agree plain text can be fine, but page width has also been an issue with plain text for a long time :/. Although 38 character width works well most of the time IMO.

The user settings could have CSS by kind of element (such as <article> or <body>), or by CSS classes, or other attributes (such as ARIA), although stuff such as <article> isn't consistently applied anyways. If necessary, there should be some way to specify global CSS rules which are not applied to webpages that have their own CSS (either in the document or defined by the user).

This is how I see things. As a user, I don't want to have to set custom specifications for my browser (especially since a lot of sites will break them).

I just want a site to look good as a _baseline_, and then I can resize / adjust if I really need to.

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