Ask HN: Favorite text heavy blogs that are a joy to read? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Favorite text heavy blogs that are a joy to read?

122 pointsjoshmarinacci31 comments

After ten years I’m working on a redesign of my personal tech blog. I want to look at some other blogs with good modern design. Of course searching for ‘well designed blogs’ or ‘webdesign 2026’ brings up endless marketing listicles. Even after wading through the crap, the advice is focused on advertising and product centric sites, not prose heavy sites with good typography.

So my question to you is: What are some of your favorite text heavy blogs that are a joy to read?

I don’t mean the content (though that helps too), but rather sites where the actual experience of reading is pleasant. Think: good fonts, sticky headers (or not), well formatted code snippets, and responsive images. Slide in navbars vs inline table of contents.

Thanks, - j

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Lesswrong for both sidebars: the heading based TOC on the left, and the margin notes on the right: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bJ2haLkcGeLtTWaD5/welcome-to...

For interactive / code snippets Maxime Heckel: https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/the-study-of-shaders-wit...

Honorable mentions Maggie Applebaum https://maggieappleton.com/ai-enlightenment Marek Chotoborski https://zanlib.dev/blog/number-inputs-in-react/

Line width, sane fonts, avoiding clever shit unless very polished, gets you a long way.

Wow. Maxime’s site is gorgeous.

Thank you

Less Wrong is wrong a lot lol.

Is it sort of how stainless steel still rusts... it just rusts, less?

I like reading Julia Evans blog. Aside from the good writings, I think the typography and the paragraph width fits nicely.

https://jvns.ca/

https://gwern.net

Came here to say this, absolute best blog typography in the last 30 yrs

Gwern's website changed my life at least 12 years ago by introducing me to spaced repetition, which solved my greatest bottleneck at the time: very smart and totally unable to remember anything in the moment to actually apply those smarts to. I'm glad I got the opportunity to finally remunerate him some very small amount after he set up a Patreon or what have you around the time of that Dwarkesh podcast. There are like at least a dozen other works on there that were formative for me too, very highly recommended.

I like the design of https://dbushell.com/blog/

Though mainly I just like the general 50s aesthetics of it, rather than specific UI elements.

I definitely read that as D-Bus hell

Here is a decent collection of some text heavy personal sites. Not affiliated in any way: https://mnmm.xyz/

https://computer.rip/

One of my favorites.

Language Log: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

The simple layout/theme does not get in the way of the reading.

https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/ - book design adapted for web

https://practicaltypography.com/ - tons of practical advice on typefaces and text-based UX

https://harmful.cat-v.org/ - more of a "website-style" layout than the above two

https://www.worksinprogress.news

for some reason, stripe owns this magazine

https://dfns.dyalog.com/n_sudoku.htm

Explanation of Sudoku in APL. Lots of information, absolutely no clutter. Entire page is nothing but text in a single precise sans-serif typewriter font, the same size and strength for everything: headings, explanation, code, and tables. Typewriter font includes mathematical symbols.

Anything here: https://bearblog.dev/discover/

This one looks good to me. https://matklad.github.io/. Coincidentally the author has recently posted about CSS for blogs https://matklad.github.io/2026/06/04/css-unavoidable-bad-par....

I have my own blog, but I'm unhappy with its design as well; therefore I'm not sharing it. Nevertheless, I find particularly challenging two things: 1. Make tables readable from a smartphone. There are a few tricks which allow you to make a responsive table. However, those tricks implies that you use <ul> or <div> instead of <table> which defeats the point of having a table. 2. I had an article where I needed to put a tiny mind map. Eventually I put it as a picture, because the solutions to draw a mind map with JavaScript made the page as twice as heavy.

surprised this isn't top

> https://ciechanow.ski/

https://zed.dev/blog (somewhat quirkier, sidebars)

https://tailscale.com/blog (overall clean)

https://arun.is/blog (sidebar, colors)

https://www.vitsoe.com/us/voice (general feel)

https://github.com/TryGhost/Headline (interesting article header, open source)

The Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/

I’ve gotten a few emails complimenting the format of this post below. It’s got fragment-links that scroll and highlight the corresponding part in the code snippet.

https://ericfortis.com/blog/freebsd-jails-network-setup

https://sites.gatech.edu/alexburgin/on-self-respect-by-joan-...

Dramatic sepia photograph contrasts with understated gray text on light gray background with lots of empty space.

I like the formatting and readability of https://nesbitt.io/2026/05/28/protestware-for-coding-agents.... though I wish it loaded faster.

https://www.datagubbe.se/short/

Header, body, trailer panels with three complementary background shades that soften the large black sans-serif typography.

I think the website of James Sinclair has some great typographical choices, see the colophon for details: https://jrsinclair.com/about/

Not tech related but I'm a fan of https://acoup.blog/

Just finished a series on

acoup.blog

Must also mention

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

I really like https://dynomight.net/

commenting so i come back here at some point and read some of the blogs people are suggesting. I pretty much haven't found any text-heavy blogs that I enjoy anymore.

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