I went down a rabbit hole of blog posts the past couple days, partially looking to get out of a mental rut, partially looking for inspiration. (Yes, these are different things.)

I chose the current theme for this blog based on a limited number of options present on the eleventy site; I wanted something I could bootstrap quickly, and not worry too much about the details. But I have always had aspirations for what kind of presentation I would have here, and the current layout is Not Where I Want To Be.

When you start thinking about what your own blog looks like, you start developing Strong Opinions about all text online, and if you're not careful, you can be driven mad (over)thinking it. The worst failure mode here is that you get so obsessed with the details of your text presentation that you end up massaging your presentation endlessly, and never generate any content.

Readers, and you, will get a lot more value out of Any Content Whatsoever than from perfect presentation, so it is best to remember that altering your presentation is something you "earn" the right to do over time. The more content you produce, the more you are "allowed" to worry about how best to display it.

Table stakes

I'm a big believer in readability, so there are a couple things that are non-negotiable:

  • using a decent typeface
  • using a default font size that works for the majority of users, without adjustment
  • having line lengths that hit the sweet spot
  • giving readers a sense of place within the text
  • navigability (can I jump back and forth between footnotes and the text?)
  • "aesthetics"

Further, I plan to include a lot more code in the future, so I have to be mindful of how code will read, and fit, on this blog. There are any number of websites out there that include code formatters that have either broken during site transitions (new hosting platform, new stylesheet) or never quite worked, and their authors never had the attention to detail to get them right.

The theme I chose is ... adequate for these purposes. That's fine for now (see the earlier point about the value of content over presentation), but that's not where I want to be.

In particular, though, there are baseline features that I'm not using at all. I don't have a Table of Contents yet. I don't love the typeface / font selections. I don't have anchor tags for section headers. I am not using footnotes at all.

But those are the least of my problems, because of other shortcomings.

How does your blog read?

My earliest inspiration for what I wanted my blog to be like came from programming in the twenty-first century. Hague's site is generated by a small amount of custom code, but I think following exactly in his footsteps misses a critical point: hardly anything he ever wrote is longer than 1000 words. (One of his most viral posts is the kind of thing you could dash off, if you know what you want to talk about, in about 20 minutes.)

But my voice doesn't permit me to write that short; I'm trying to work up to something large, before winnowing back down to something much smaller, and the process is going to be ugly.

Hague's site does have some interesting things going for it. Because all the posts are small and cross-linked, finding your way to one post naturally leads into the depths of others, for as long as your curiosity and patience hold up.

In that regard, his site's navigability is top-notch. All his posts explore one tiny idea, in a way that is engaging (starting, almost always, with a solid hook); he uses good titles; the :visited link color shows you where you've been (not doing so is a sin that a lot of sites' stylesheets fall victim to).

Because of his choices, he doesn't need things like ToCs or anchor links; when the entire post's content fits above the fold, that stuff is redundant.

Not-so-simple sites

Meanwhile, look at some sites with more elaborate formatting:

  • Alexey Guzey's, which has a ToC, uses color and text weight and spacing in a delicious way, and feels dense.
  • James Clear's, which is structurally almost identical to Hague's (good posts, cross-linked, with a clear about sidebar), but couldn't be more different visually.
  • Gwern's, which is dense as can be and cross-linked to hell and back; rich with metadata. Gwern's site is like a public knowledge graph.
  • Andy Matuschak's, which is like Gwern's on steroids; in places, it uses a novel depth-tracking system that lets you trace his thoughts via a series of vertical panes that expand sideways. (It takes five minutes to "get" his site, and then you might start wondering if you could build something similar, or snag his code.)

There are tons more; the blogosphere is still rich with examples, but it can be hard to find threads to trace since the fall-off in blogging platforms.

Not-so-great sites

If the sites above are good, what sites are bad?

The worst offenders are overly monetized / SEO-f--ked tech sites.[1] They can't even be bothered to get the content to render properly most of the time, because the content isn't the point; the point is revenue extraction.

Someone who was so inclined could probably compile a "worst-of" list, showing all the sins of terrible content farms and so on. That's not interesting to me; I'm mostly curious about places that attempt to communicate earnestly and fail in some way.

Medium and Substack are adequate, not great. They are, to put it mildly, lowest-common denominator platforms.[2]

As platforms, they are engineered for a different portion of the solution space around "text on a page." Medium wanted to be the blog-to-end-all-blogs.[3]

Substack wants to be a social nexus? It started with text-on-a-page and payments, and now has podcasts, and chats, and God-knows-what-else-this-week.

Their default stylesheets are good, and to be quite honest sidestep a lot of potential issues around trying to get your stylesheet perfect (that most non-design people can't quite pull off, anyway). They certainly have a distinct visual language; you can generally tell when you're on a Medium page or a Substack site.

Google forgot they have blogspot, which means it has any number of issues, but at least it's a known quantity: the default blog from 2005. Fashions, and web technologies, have not been kind to blogspot pages.

Paul Graham's essays are fine, mainly because the content knows what it wants to be and is stable (the links haven't changed in 20 years, and probably never will), but navigability is not great, and the text formatting feels like it was optimized for screen sizes in 2002.

Dan Luu's website is full of amazing content, but readability is right out the window. He doesn't even have a stylesheet. But, in all honesty, this might be the ideal for some use cases. There are many subject-matter experts who post online but whose sites are frozen in time; they built a website in 1996, and can't be bothered to update the visuals because, after all, they work. (Potentially an example of countersignaling, potentially a case of "the cobbler's children have no shoes.")

What does your formatting say about you?

A lot of people that use off-the-shelf tools (Substack, Medium, no stylesheet at all) deliver high-alpha content; there is also a lot of trash on these sites and sites like them. So when you choose one of these routes, you're telling the reader "I believe in my own product, as-is."

On the other hand, something that looks too professional can send the wrong message. A site that is easy to read, visually, can feel like a glossy pamphlet; readers might slide right off because subconsciously your site feels like marketing material to them.

It doesn't pay to overthink the formatting of your blog, so long as it serves the purposes of a blog. But, if you want to attract readers and make connections, it does pay to make a place people want to go to. A lot of that, I think, means finding the right match between how you present yourself and what you choose to present, and in many, many cases that means making a visually distinct (and at times, functionally distinct) home on the web.

In light of that, at some point in the future, I will have to think more about which portions of other blogs' style I want to steal for my own.

The poor man's guide to making a readable blog

In all honestly, the frills of some of the "good" sites above feel nice, but you can get more mileage out of simple elaborations than going crazy making an entire "platform."[4]

In particular, here are things that will benefit your content no matter what stylesheet you use:

  • break up the flow of your site, beyond "large blocks of text," using things like well-formatted bullets and lists and headers and subheaders
  • add an image or two (with a caption, to link it back to the topic!)
  • use blockquotes and pullquotes strategically

But nothing can replace the fundamentals:

  • Write about something you care about
  • Choose a good title
  • Don't forget the hook
  • Write just long enough to cover everything, but short enough to keep it interesting.

  1. I can't think of a good example off the top of my head; these sites are slippery anti-memes. If you ever go looking for the answer to an obscure issue, though, about 70% of the top hits on Google are these. ↩︎

  2. Back in the day, I thought Medium was going to trigger a renaissance in readable text on the web. Then, they fell to the same ill as any number of other platforms—monetization. ↩︎

  3. As far as I can tell; I can't be assed to do the archaeology here. ↩︎

  4. One critique of knowledge graphs and elaborate note-taking systems that I quite like goes as follows: how often have you heard of someone who obsesses over "productivity" tools actually producing something great? ↩︎