- S-TIER blogs are those that are animated, visual, interactive and absolutely blow your mind off
- A-TIER are highly informative and you ll learn something
- opinion blogs at the absolute bottom of the tier list because everyone everywhere ll always have an opinion about everything and my life is too short to be reading all that
- these are the BEST of the BEST, you ll be blown away opening each page is how good they are. i am thinking of creating a bookmark manager that uses my criteria above and runs across every damn blog link ever posted on HN to categorize them as S-TIER, A-TIER, opinion and so on
- require 3 clicks and 10 seconds to navigate to a subpage. No indication whether it's trying to load or not (growingswe)
- have underlined headers that are not links (mlu-explain)
- hijack scrolling, the back button and navigation history (seeing-theory)
I do not disagree these blogs are awesome. Of these I knew ciechanow.ski and lumafield - famous and exceptional. Just... I feel a bit disappointed when someone pumps excitement, and your first experience with the websites are either weird design choices or bad UX, intentionally or not.
i didnt notice any difference in the scrolling part. how did you conclude it is hijacking the scroll. Also the other sites load fine for me. Also this is not about performance. I dont care if they take 10 seconds to load but the content to be presented in a way unlike any of the 451534856415348678513656 other blogs out there
I have more. You can keep rolling the dice on https://indieblog.page/random and eventually you'll stumble across some pretty sites. Usually the nicest ones are from frontend / design engineer types of people. EDIT - oh and the sites in the internet phone book! https://internetphonebook.net/ as well as browsing screenshots at https://personalsit.es/
Some of these sites - wow. I literally can’t fall asleep right now (reading this in bed) scrolling through all these. So many good resources. Thank you for sharing. This is why I love HN
One I like is Tom Macwright’s blog [1], which somewhat famously loads insanely fast thanks to having a sort of the web equivalent of a brutalist design while still looking nice [2].
There might have been few more such blogs over the years but this one has stayed in memory long after I stopped going to it and eventually it stopped (sort of). It was not just the design but also the simplicty of the conent and being very accessible.
This isn't a blog, but more than 20 years ago I saw a Flash web game which I've always remembered as the most beautiful piece of interactive online content I'd ever seen.
It took a while to find it again... (I searched Google images until I found a screenshot that looked right.) Somebody archived it and resurrected it with Ruffle. (It looks better if you go to "Full Screen" mode.) But the aesthetic was just incredible...
https://allaboutberlin.com is optimised for readability and ease of navigation. That's what a website should do, although I love when bloggers use their own art in the designs.
I like how readable it is. Be sure to handle long lines that ruin page widths on small screens -- probably the commit hash should overflow-wrap: break-word, or in a horizontally scrollable container element, or a similar solution.
One designy thing I've been practicing is to be intentional about every margin / piece of whitespace, and to use a proportional scale like https://utopia.fyi/. You might find that if you align more elements and stick to the scale, things might look extra pleasing. (Maybe you already have, idk, just first impressions from my phone)
- subscribe button placement looks uneven, esp on mobile. Maybe it could be a simple underlined link?
- imo centered text is a crutch that often looks better when left justified instead, or rerranged with some other solution. I'm thinking of the mobile navbar and lengthy captions. This is more subjective tho
- homepage could use more posts! Looking forward to your future writing
- the most beautiful sites usually come up with some unique theme or visual identity or creative stunt to break away from a vanilla default theme. But people still like basic readable websites if the content is great.
there is noscript fallback if required with the same content. I have nice background mouse effect going on against the backdrop also it is no built as just a portfolio landing, it is built as an spa with plans for expansion much more. Needed to give myself the flexibility
I have been having a great time using Astro with https://github.com/lucernae/astro-blog-template . Looks modern and minimal, but not too minimal which i despise. On the technical side of things, Static Site Generation is perfect for small blogs, so after some tweaks I got its loading times down to milliseconds! Here's the blog I came up with: https://blog.cellutils.com/
- A-TIER are highly informative and you ll learn something
- opinion blogs at the absolute bottom of the tier list because everyone everywhere ll always have an opinion about everything and my life is too short to be reading all that
- these are the S-TIER ones on my system
- https://growingswe.com/blog
- https://ciechanow.ski/archives/
- https://mlu-explain.github.io/
- https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/index.html#firstPage
- https://svg-tutorial.com/
- https://www.lumafield.com/scan-of-the-month/health-wearables
- these are the BEST of the BEST, you ll be blown away opening each page is how good they are. i am thinking of creating a bookmark manager that uses my criteria above and runs across every damn blog link ever posted on HN to categorize them as S-TIER, A-TIER, opinion and so on
- require 3 clicks and 10 seconds to navigate to a subpage. No indication whether it's trying to load or not (growingswe)
- have underlined headers that are not links (mlu-explain)
- hijack scrolling, the back button and navigation history (seeing-theory)
I do not disagree these blogs are awesome. Of these I knew ciechanow.ski and lumafield - famous and exceptional. Just... I feel a bit disappointed when someone pumps excitement, and your first experience with the websites are either weird design choices or bad UX, intentionally or not.
Anyway, thanks for sharing!
- https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/index.html#firstPage
- https://svg-tutorial.com/
Too amazing
Artsy: https://anhvn.com/
Simple yet elegant: https://www.lkhrs.com/ and https://arun.is/blog/
Maximalist: https://henry.codes/ and https://garden.bradwoods.io/ and https://blog.maximeheckel.com/
Old-school / indie web: https://ribo.zone/
Text mode / ASCII art: https://adelfaure.net/
Typography: http://davidcole.me/ and https://www.petemillspaugh.com/
I have more. You can keep rolling the dice on https://indieblog.page/random and eventually you'll stumble across some pretty sites. Usually the nicest ones are from frontend / design engineer types of people. EDIT - oh and the sites in the internet phone book! https://internetphonebook.net/ as well as browsing screenshots at https://personalsit.es/
- https://www.fev.al/
- https://hugo.blog/
I just like this type of typography.
[1] https://macwright.com/
[2] https://macwright.com/2016/05/03/the-featherweight-website
Steph Ango's website comes to my mind: https://stephango.com/ramblings
I guess I also really like my own: https://bryanhogan.com/
I also realised writing this, 3 other pages I wanted to share didn't include a blog (1. https://www.yasmins.site/projects 2. https://www.alasdairmonk.com/ 3.https://glenn.me/ ).
Very artsy but also nice: https://www.nicchan.me/about/
https://maggieappleton.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170608203825/http://onethingwe... - used to be slightly simpler and less colourful.
There might have been few more such blogs over the years but this one has stayed in memory long after I stopped going to it and eventually it stopped (sort of). It was not just the design but also the simplicty of the conent and being very accessible.
It took a while to find it again... (I searched Google images until I found a screenshot that looked right.) Somebody archived it and resurrected it with Ruffle. (It looks better if you go to "Full Screen" mode.) But the aesthetic was just incredible...
I give you -- "A Murder of Scarecrows."
https://www.gamesflow.com/jeux.php?id=2062366
https://simonaking.com
https://allaboutberlin.com is optimised for readability and ease of navigation. That's what a website should do, although I love when bloggers use their own art in the designs.
https://www.yourworldoftext.com
One designy thing I've been practicing is to be intentional about every margin / piece of whitespace, and to use a proportional scale like https://utopia.fyi/. You might find that if you align more elements and stick to the scale, things might look extra pleasing. (Maybe you already have, idk, just first impressions from my phone)
- subscribe button placement looks uneven, esp on mobile. Maybe it could be a simple underlined link?
- imo centered text is a crutch that often looks better when left justified instead, or rerranged with some other solution. I'm thinking of the mobile navbar and lengthy captions. This is more subjective tho
- homepage could use more posts! Looking forward to your future writing
- the most beautiful sites usually come up with some unique theme or visual identity or creative stunt to break away from a vanilla default theme. But people still like basic readable websites if the content is great.
https://bryson.cc
You may want to spell "résumé" with the accents. I believe that is the technically correct spelling.
https://meyerweb.com/
Although it is a bit slow to load sometimes.
* lesswrong