A friend of mine shared with me the blog gwern.net of Gwern Branwen^*. The design is remarkably thoughtful, and there is even a page that describes the design reasoning behind every feature. There are definitely things that I would want to "steal," like

• The importance tags. To help sorting or filtering out personal thoughts and experiences that don't matter for the readers.

• The writing progress status. Currently, most of my miniblog posts are either a published post or a draft, i.e. WIP private post. Published posts that will certainly receive constant updates should indeed be marked as "in progress", although that doesn't prevent normal post getting updated.

• The fight against link rot^*. Extensive local archives (academic papers, etc.) and URLs archiving^*.

• The blogroll, implemented in the footer as a quote/site/link of the day.

• The link popup. Including text, document, code, image, but work as well for whitelisted webpage links, all well-integrated into the same UI. Wikipedia links are specially-supported, enabling Wikipedia-style of recursive navigation. These popups behave more like windows : they can be pinned, minimized, and maximized.

On the other hand, there are features that feel very clunky^* like the "years past between two dates" annotations^*, though the imperial/metric units conversion and the CPI inflation adjustment are rather helpful.

Interestingly, AFAIK, his website has no comments section but support anonymous feedback through Google form.

He had conducted lots of design experimentations that have been abandoned throughout the time, so we don't have to go through the same path.

Pseudonym. What this miniblog does so far is performing snapshot on Reddit and Twitter posts and comments. These rot faster than anything else. But we surely need to extend our prevention to some extent. This is a bit extreme for now, but valuable insight for later stage of this blog. It is probably a direct consequence of one of their design principles wich is "more > less". The most American thing ever (joking), but for some reason give me the aesthetics of Star Wars epoch reference point notation (BBY).