Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

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). 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.

- CSV export. In addition to RSS, you can download my site as 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

- 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.

> - 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> a new language (Scroll) that is mathematically shown to be the simplest/most powerful language yet invented

This is, at best, ambiguous. To show something mathematically, you have to have a precise definition of it, and neither "simple" nor "powerful" admits a precise definition that is widely agreeable enough for any mathematical proof based on it to be worth anything.

I stand by my claim.

I point you to https://breckyunits.com/pcri.html

Further background:

- https://breckyunits.com/intelligence.html

- https://github.com/breck7/breckyunits.com/blob/main/research...

- https://github.com/breck7/breckyunits.com/blob/main/research...

- https://github.com/breck7/breckyunits.com/blob/main/research...

I was thinking about this recently as I added it to a site. The use case is slightly different because the site in question was more data-driven than a blog. One example is viewing an individual item and being able to navigate to the next item in alphabetical order. This uses link elements with the appropriate rel values.

The problem of losing context can be mitigated by having the page return to the previous location on back, something which browsers kinda already do, just not very well.

Alternatively, I assume you'd prefer some kind of modifier? This has problems of its own — e.g. shortcut clashes. YouTube uses comma and full stop as frame next/previous shortcuts — maybe we should standardise on those?

> - 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

Very neat! Many other are cool too.

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