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Comment by kderbe | Hacker News Reader

The most over-engineered blog that I know of is Casey Muratori's at http://mollyrocket.com/casey/ . "View source" and you'll see a long list of auto-generated variables and function calls, unlike anything else you've probably seen for any website.

Casey attempts to explain what he did in a podcast[1]. Apparently, he was frustrated enough with CSS's margins that he built a layout engine in C that calculates offsets for every piece of text in the page, then generates hundreds of lines of Javascript that apply fixed positioning to arrange the text.

[1] transcript: http://mollyrocket.com/jacs/jacs_0004_0010.html

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To be fair, the most over-engineered blog I know of is anything hosted on top of this: http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7152 ;)

"This paper proposes a new microblogging architecture based on peer-to-peer networks overlays. The proposed platform is comprised of three mostly independent overlay networks. The first provides distributed user registration and authentication and is based on the Bitcoin protocol. The second one is a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) overlay network providing key/value storage for user resources and tracker location for the third network. The last network is a collection of possibly disjoint “swarms” of followers, based on the Bittorrent protocol,..."

(and I am sure someone will come up with an example of a blogging platform that starts at the level of specialized mesh networking hardware or something like that...)

This isn't quite as crazy, but in the spirit of overengineered blogs, this guy tried to make every single element of his blog optimized by automatic A/B testing: http://www.metamorphosite.com/about

Oh man, I love his website!

You should have seen it about a year ago, it was even crazier. The same layout engine in C, but it also just did a massive innerHTML set at the root of the page with a huge string of HTML. It was awesome.

Good point, though. He beats me by far.

(PS. you probably know this, but I forgive him because he's an awesome low-level games programmer so it's in his blood to do stuff like that)

LOL. When I saw the OP headline in the list, I immediately thought, "Someone is complaining about Casey Muratori's blog again"...it seems virtually every time something of Muratori's is posted somewhere (on HN, reddit, etc) -- which is frequently, given the quality of his articles -- someone will chime in to bash the source code of his blog.

While the effort is remarkable, the web isn't fixed and this isn't responsive. Just wondering what happens if someone hasn't that font installed or the browser rendering is still different and everything is off then. At least the whole website isn't an image file ...

For me it's rather an expression of ignoring that websites are always slightly differently displayed than a good solution.

The browser is still figuring out the sizes (the invisible div with the innerhtml). If it doesn't have that font, it will give the size for the font it does have, and then the layout engine will use that size. It's wonderful.

that blog is extremely quick to load.

But is it responsive!? /s

Does that explain why Pocket fails on that blog? Every few months I pocket something from it and then am disappointed when it comes up blank while I'm on a plane, etc.

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