a simple on-click card to keep the thing going until I build something better.

Here is an example(click on the card):

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."

For all you know, this could be used for some interesting things if you have a tutorials website where you write posts on technical concepts. So that's that.

The Gimmicks

Profile Board for Main Site

If you have ever used a social media with feeds you probably have stalked the profiles of people you find interesting, but the problem is as much as the mystery gets someone into look at your profile, it also makes them form opinions. If the profile reads author, you see their feed one way; and if it says scientist from Caltech, you see it the other. I mean as much as authority is a thing to form opinions about, it also alienates people from what could potentially have been a great relation if not for the credentiality and appearance. So, the idea with the profile board was to get done with this stuff right away so that people can enjoy the content instead of going profile hunting on your credibility and accomplishments and appearances to judge and validate their opinions by validating you.

Here is the screenshot:

Omnisearch bar

This is inspired by the browsers like Chrome and Firefox where the searchbar is always placed at the top so that readers can easily search for the next thing without having to go back to the main page and scroll through dozens of articles.

And I personally like this one because, it allows me as an author/writer to quickly jump between different posts while I am reading my articles to reference in my other articles.

Here is a screenshot:

Note: The searchbar is not implemented as a scrollspying widget that pins itself automatically is because I have a preference for distraction free content when reading, that is why the website provides a chevron to scroll to the top easily instead of pinning the search to the header.

Feed-like structure

I am a big fan of Aza Raskin's infinite scroll design and the fact that it provides such an easy way to engage users is just mind-blowing. That said, I must also confess that I am not a big fan of infinite scrolls on social media websites given their addictive nature. Blogs are fundamentally finite in nature. I mean even if you are a highly productive individual who writes a thousand page essay a day, you would have only written 365 essays and not all of them interesting to me. So having a feed-like structure on blogs I feel is fundamental to allowing users to engage in a more neutral way.

And if you are still not sure of its utility, go join twitter or facebook or instagram, and comeback to read this again after a month or so.

Untill then here is the screenshot:

Auto-tagging WIP posts on the feed

Sometimes you are writing something interesting but have not completed the entire thing, lets say like a series of posts on single, it can be helpful to show users right away on the feed/homepage the status so that when they click the post, their expectations are already managed.

Here is a screenshot.

Clickable tags

If you go the posts on the homepage, and go inside any of them and try to click on the tags such as date or category, you will see that it takes you to a page with all the posts belonging to that tag or date. Just a nifty little feature.

And that is all! Thanks for scrolling all the way through to see all the features. Now if you'd like to know how to use this theme, head over to the post titled [[How to setup Simply Jekyll]]. And if you would like to see how to use these features, head over to [[How to use Simply Jekyll features on your website]]

P.S If you use VSCode like me for content creation and authoring, and are interested in autocompletion of titles when you write your notes. You can use a small VSCode plugin that I wrote for myself to ease up my writing process: [[Notecomplete::https://github.com/raghuveerdotnet/scratchpad/tree/master/note-complete]]