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gwern.net
Site infrastructure for gwern.net (CSS/JS/HS/images/icons). Custom Hakyll website with unique automatic link archiving, recursive tooltip popup UX, dark mode, and typography (sidenotes+dropcaps+admonitions+inflation-adjuster).
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InfluxDB
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Soon after my startup launched, Gwern asked to do a test of our reading-enhancement technology on his site. His test is now described in the Abandoned section on the linked page. [1]
I learned a very valuable lesson from our interaction: having someone test out your software in a public way is great, but if they fundamentally disagree with how the UX should function, you can't cede control.
Gwern disagreed with us on two fundamental points: (1) which color schemes to use, and (2) whether the user should be aware of (and presumably control) the activation and settings of the technology.
We knew from our usage data that practically no one used the greyscale theme — almost everyone used our colored themes. We also suspected that running a test where users were not made aware of the purpose of the color gradients would confuse and possibly annoy users — especially if they couldn't turn it on/off or change the colors.
The results were not surprising to us: lots of people were confused, and the color-based themes were more popular than he anticipated. In all of our subsequent partnerships/testing, we firmed up our UX guidelines and didn't so much control of testing procedures.
It was perhaps the right move to be flexible in the beginning — who were we, next to the mighty Gwern! But looking back it would have been much better for us (and I think Gwern as well) if the UX had been done in a way that gives users control. One nice looking example of our desired UX is here. [2]
1: https://www.gwern.net/Design#abandoned
2: https://unreasonable.is/how-to-stop-working-and-be-more-prod...
That page is a bit outdated because I am still finetuning the on-site archive system before I do a writeup.
I still use archiver-bot etc, they're just not how I do the on-site archives. See https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/blob/master/build/LinkArc... https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/blob/master/build/linkArc... for that.
The quick summary is that PDFs are automatically downloaded, hosted locally, and links rewritten to the local PDF; other URLs, after a delay, call the CLI version of https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile to run headless Chrome to dump a snapshot, which are manually reviewed by myself & improved as necessary, and then links get rewritten to the snapshot HTML. They get some no-crawl HTTP headers and robots.txt exclusions to try to reduce copyright trouble.
Sorry, that's not minimalism. gwern.net isn't either; I'd call that "brutalism" instead.
THIS is minimalism: https://manuel.kiessling.net
Precisely in the sense of "NOT a lot going on at all times". Just the content, presented pleasently.
And importantly, it's not only minimalism in look-and-feel, but also technically: even a long post with an embedded image like https://manuel.kiessling.net/2021/05/02/tutorial-react-singl... weighs in at under 200 KiB. Loads in under 3 seconds even on "slow 3G" in Chrome. 362 milliseconds via my office's wifi.
Also, no JavaScript. Nothing moves or jumps. Perfectly usable and consumable in a CLI browser like Lynx.
All of that without looking brutalist.
It's clear that a lot of love and attention to detail has gone into the making of this website. I like the typography, I like the layout on desktop, I feel like that's very much complete, apart from one thing I'll mention later.
As another person has commented, it does feel inspired by Tufte stuff — though I actually find the Tufte CSS implementation to be preferable to look at aesthetically and preferable for actually consuming content: https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/
Things I would change:
- the pop-up windows when hovering links etc. are incredibly annoying. There is a button to get rid of them, but that button needs to be on the side with the other customisation options imho
- vertical spacing would look better than indentation for new paragraphs on mobile, it would help the text not look so densely packed, but maybe that's just my preference. It's usable just feels like the text is squashed in (I'm looking at it on an iPhone X). The choice of indentation for new paragraphs looks fine on desktop.
Multiple columns for wide windows is something I find interesting. I haven't seen anyone do a two-column layout which I find satisfactory. https://breckyunits.com/ is a fascinating example, but the layout goes vertically, so the result is bizarre: the most recent article will be cheek by jowl with an old page from 2012. I think it would need be the opposite, wrap horizontally, and scroll-in-place. Something like that. If I ever make another site, I might try to do something along those lines (and maybe use a red/blue centric color scheme).
Have you considered switching to Commento [1] instead of Disqus? It is way more lightweight than Disqus, has spam filter and allows importing from Disqus.
[1] https://commento.io/