Sort your sites out! – Happily Imperfect

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Sort your sites out!

I read a lot of blog posts in my RSS reader of choice —NetNewsWire— but for those I want to revisit I tend to open the post directly in Safari so I can go back to it later. Yes, I KNOW, there are a myriad of ‘read later’ apps available.

The trouble is that some websites are just not good as an experience. One I’ve visited twice now has confused me both times, as it has large bars down the side of the window that mark a paragraph, with each paragraph having a bar on a different side of the screen, it’s like badly formatted block quotes or something.

That said, there is a common theme of minor peeves that I stumbled across on many websites which are, in no particular order:

Comments are good, add them. Yes, I know it opens up things like spam but if you are posting to spark a conversation then why not have them? (and if you aren’t open to conversation, in public, don’t post??).

Using all lowercase text is bad for readability (and looks like you didn’t learn how to write properly).

Layout is important, make your content the focus (see that weird non-block quotes layout I mentioned before)

Tiny default text = bad.

Too much clutter on the page = bad.

I’m being trite, and glib, and I know a lot of this can be subjective.

I have no excuse for this grumpy post. Sure, it’s been a long day —my own fault, getting up at 4:30am to go for a walk— but browsing some sites on my lunch and all of these things hit me in the space of about 20 mins, it’s madness!! Don’t you want people to read what you wrote? Why are you making that experience not nice?

Whilst I am not willing to die on these hills, I mean it’s only blogging, they do irk me so.

And no, I will not name names so don’t ask (in public).

sshhhhh this is a bit of a test…

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Category: Notes

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4 responses to "Sort your sites out!"

Gordon

May 28, 2026 at 3:56 pm

Thought of another one – posts that are one line. View them on a website and they get lost amongst the navigation, comment box (presuming there is one), and all the links and noise that good sites have!

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Dan Q

May 28, 2026 at 4:43 pm

It irks me when a site leans too-heavily on JavaScript. Like: HTML gave us a way to add images; why did {some site} take it, throw it away, then replace it with a worse version powered by a ton of JavaScript that may or may not work properly? Just use HTML!

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Gordon McLean

May 28, 2026 at 5:02 pm

I admit that I am at the behest of WordPress as I’m a long time away from hand coding my site, but there does seem to be a fair bit of cruft code on my site which I also don’t like.

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Gordon McLean

May 28, 2026 at 6:32 pm

And another with no comments and no obvious way to contact the author to point out they’ve misspelled my surname…

https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/pook-emu-bee-links-for-05-28-26/

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