Twenty Thirteen | Hacker News Reader

Twenty Thirteen

raganwald.com

67 pointsraganwald23 comments

You mentioned outsourcing your comments to HN (by way of submitting your own post and then linking to the discussion HN thread). Is this considered kosher as long as the topic is relevant to the HN community? And does it just so happen that bloggers who do this only write posts that are HN-worthy?

This may work simply because it is self-policing, since self-submiting on a topic in a gray area would risk hell-banning. I am curious if you ever choose not to exercise the outsourcing for a post that wouldn't be of interest.

Related discussions as to why people prefer HN as their commenting system here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5247226

I think what raganwald was saying is that the blog itself will be comment-free. If topics from it end up (legitimately) posted on HN, reddit, et al., with commenting occurring there, fine.

I did not take the description to mean that every post would have a link to "comment on HN" connected to a pre-spun-up HN post. (And, with HN's relatively recent changes to headers to disallow framing [1] in compliant browsers, there won't be any framed HN threads.)

I think that for the latter to occur (as opposed to not -- the current situation), would very likely go against the management wishes and objectives of HN. For several reasons: Relevance (or not); the ban on excessive self-promotion; the implications for HN should this become at all widespread.

TL;DR: HN is not Discus, and per my reading of OP, raganwald is not treating it like Discus, so all's fine.

[1] Last I checked, HN is now setting X-Frame-Options to "deny". Or, they have been, and I noticed more recently when it started borking a client-side extension I was using.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTTP/X-Frame-Option...

I don't submit all of my posts. If I think a post is appropriate for HN, I usually wait a few hours and see if someone else submits it first.

Only then do I add a link back to HN, not a frame of some kind.

If my blog was a magazine, I wouldn't want to drag people into my home office to read it and discuss it, I want them to take the magazine to their book club and read it and discuss it there.

And it isn't always HN. I've noticed very little interest in discussing my JavaScript posts here, so now I link to the http://reddit.com/r/javascript discussions, where there have been more comments.

Thanks for the explanation. I didn't understand how and in what circumstances the posts were linked. It makes sense to bring the discussion to the communities of interest for a variety of reasons, especially if your topics are varied.

You mentioned using footnotes. I agree that it's a great way to contain side points, digressions and references. I have a design/readability question though: how do you feel about using sidenotes instead of footnotes though? Like e.g. how Bret Victor uses them [0]?

[0] - http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#p72

+1, or better yet, an on-hover for the footnote anchor which shows the actual footnote. Either way, I hate scrolling back and forth for context.

The hover based feedback was great for its time, but now, it breaks on newer touch based interfaces.

It would be nice if people didn't abandon things that benefit the mouse just because they don't work on touch. It's possible to support both a hover-based and a touch-based interaction paradigm for footnotes.

This comes up pretty much every time pg posts an essay. Just click the footnote link, read it, then hit back.

Alternatively, people could provide a link back to the place in the essay and use the :target CSS selector to highlight the footnote link to make finding their place easier.

Can you remove position:fixed from the header css, it makes more sense when that theme is used as a doc but for a blog it is unnecessary.

Seconded. You mention distraction-free writing in your blog post; position:fixed headers make for the opposite of distraction-free reading.

Edit: also, the return link from a footnote hides the footnote behind the header. I'll point out, though, that overall the theme looks very good and I like the idea. I'll probably do something similar in my own migration away from Posterous.

Jekyll or any markdown enabled DRCS is the cat's ass. It's beautifully simple and a shift towards social collaboration for content and not just code.

> I drop a CNAME file into the repo. For http://raganwald.com, the file contains the text raganwald.com. Once you push that, Github starts resolving hits to raganwald.com to whatever you are publishing

What prevents me from putting a CNAME file with that in my own repo, out of curiosity?

@raganwald: I've used just about the same setup to power my own writing blog (http://slicedupfor.me) and other sites for several months now, but I have it all under one Github account. Am I missing some benefits from a multi-account setup? Thanks.

There's something I'm doing that Github doesn't like. For example, I just removed the CNAME from oscin-es/oscin-es.github.com and added it to one of my repos called oscin.es.

But all I'm getting at http://oscin.es is a 404.

I can see it works for you, not sure why it doesn't for me.

UPDATE: Now it's working! Ok, I need to update my blog post. Thanks!

Curious. You can contact me at news.ycombinator.com@thirdtruck.org to exchange notes if you want to pursue the root cause further.

Do you have an archive of your pre-homoiconic blog? There were some very good posts, and the Wayback machine doesn't have it.

http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://raganwald.com/

Constructive criticism for those with reversed out type on their blogs like twenty thirteen. If you insist on a black background please use the color green as your font color rather than white. After 500 words or so white type on black becomes hard on the eyes.

Light grey or "wheat" (as defined by X11's rgb: 245 222 179) work well, too, and are more neutral than green. I have my terminals and Emacs wheat-on-black and I love it.

Great article, I am close to doing something similar myself, except with Hakyll and a Linode node instead of Github Pages. Pandoc (what Hakyll uses on the backend) gives the Markdown input a bit more flexibility than normal, I think.

People ditching RSS is sad. I want a web where people can write cool software that consumes and transforms and enriches other content on the web. I want more sites to make more data accessible via stable public APIs, not less.

I used to implement RSS (or better, Atom) to any blog engine I wrote. Not on my last one.

I feel like the web has moved away from feed consuming and more towards consuming content curated through social networking (think Twitter or HN).

Still I do believe some sort of API is in order, so I now mostly implement dynamic JSON output. It's not standard, but at least I don't have to deal with XML.

    it’s a win for everyone if the comments praising my writing are alongside 
    those pointing out where it could me, um, “even better.”

That should be "where it could be*" :)

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