I recently read this post on microfeatures in blogs and personal websites. Not very deliberately, but I have been experimenting with some microfeatures on this website too. A few notable ones are:
- Sidenotes inspired by Tufte's work. Not as good as Gwern's though.
- Table of contents.
- Separate markers for internal vs external links.
- Separate sections for footnotes, edit comments, and bibliography at the end.
- Separate section for abstract in the beginning.
- Per page issue tracking. This is something I was proud of when conceived but don't use it at all.
You can find most of these in my test page here. Not all of these work well but I am going to spend more time on this website now so you should see improvements.
Anyway, this is huge digression. The point of this post was to talk about a microfeature that we can call draft posts. While my publishing package allows writing and publishing drafts which don't show in my atom feed or main post index, I don't have a good way to share a draft for people to review and collect feedback seamlessly. This is important since having accessible reviews helps produce higher quality writings. In addition to what I already have, this needs a) some way to indicate that you are reading a draft, and b) a way to take comments like in common collaborative writing tools. Today I made very tiny progress here by checking off the first requirement. Now my draft posts show a DRAFT watermark. Here is a sample draft post. I still don't think I have done justice to the CSS but I think it's good to start. Next would be figuring out some nice way to enable annotation based comments. I am inclined towards web annotation tools like Hypothesis instead of developing on my own, but am yet to decide.