Came across this great post on rachelbythebay.com titled, Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you here and it got me thinking, does my site avoid all these annoying things? Are there other annoying things that I encounter on the web that my site doesn’t do? Are there, *gulp*, things my site does that are annoying?

Annoying things my site doesn’t do

I don’t track engagement in any way. No click counter, no Google analytics, nada. Honestly, I’m just not interested in it. My site isn’t monetized, and I don’t want to obsess over what pieces do well or how many people clicked, or are subscribed, or w/e. I write because it’s fun and I enjoy engaging with those who message me about something I’ve written. Easy.

I don’t have ads of any kind. Again, I don’t monetize the site. My site is first and foremost a resource for myself. To junk it up with a bunch of ads would be counter to this mission. I’ll never have ads. That simple.

I don’t set cookies. So I have no GDPR-induced privacy pop-up you have to accept or any other cookie-related advisory notices. I actually value your privacy, and do so by not wanting to know anything about you. That is unless you want to reach out to me and chat! Then I’d love to get to know ya 😄.

I don’t track IPs. My site is hosted off GitHub Pages, and as such, I can’t even get this information. Even if I could though, I wouldn’t look at server logs because I just don’t care.

I don’t do popups. You won’t have to make any privacy concessions, nothing is going to pop up and ask you to give me money or subscribe, you can just scroll and click in peace.

I don’t abuse animations. I actually do have a few things animated within my site. There’s one page (I won’t tell you which), where the sharks in my footer will circle when you hover over them. I also have a small few indieweb-related sites that have some 88x31 oldweb-style buttons, some of which animate. Oh, and yeah, my title image has a blinking underscore, but that’s cool right?

I don’t have any autoplaying audio or video. Actually, don’t think I have any audio or video at all. Problem solved.

I don’t try to “grab you” when you back out of a page, saying something like “before you go, check out this other thing”. That’d be really annoying.

I don’t hide or otherwise not include publish dates for blogs. In fact, I have ‘published’ and ‘updated’ dates for all my content.

I don’t have elements which follow you down the page as you scroll.

I don’t have any content across pages which begs you to support me or follow me or subscribe or w/e.

I do no scroll-hijacking or tamper with how your browser has implemented scrolling. No silly “progress bar” which animates as you scroll up and down a page.

I don’t junk up my pages with icons that claim to be for “sharing” or “liking” a post.

I don’t do any dynamic page loading as you scroll down. I don’t have pages with infinite scroll. The page you wanted to see is what you see, nothing else. I have very reasonable pagination for my various post streams.

I don’t put vacuous and misleading clickbait “you may be interested in…” boxes at the bottom of my posts.

My site is not monetized, so I don’t make any money just because you go anywhere on my site.

I don’t have anything like that annoying Substack page that asks you to subscribe before redirecting you to the actual page you wanted to see.

I don’t not have a dark mode theme.

I don’t not have an RSS feed.

Nothing on my site will ask you to enable notifications in your browser, I don’t ask to send you notifications of any kind. My site doesn’t need your email.

I don’t ask for your location.

I don’t shift things on your screen annoyingly, causing you to mis-click links.

I don’t muddy my content pages with comments, or awful Disqus forums.

I don’t ask you to make an account of any kind.

I don’t have any paywalled or account-walled content.

I don’t optimize for SEO. Not saying I won’t try a fun, slightly click-baitey post title every once in a while, but it’s certainly not done to get better search rankings.

I don’t have gobs of third-party dependencies. What third-parties I do use I try to expose here.

I don’t have any janky photo carousels. In fact I keep photos sorta to a minimum on the site.

I don’t aggressively limit column width for content on large displays. If you got a beautiful, glorious, gigantic, wide-screen monitor and for some unearthly reason wanted to open my site in full-screen mode, you’ll have SUPER wide content to enjoy.

I don’t do relative dates for posts. It’s all about them absolute dates. No date math required!

I don’t have any huge banners or images on content pages. I have some larger graphics like my home page logo, but even that is relatively tame.

I don’t hide my contact information. Wanna find me on the web? It’s all pretty easy to find.

Annoying things I (unfortunately?) do

Some things I do on my site you might actually find kinda annoying. Sorry about that. I’d like to find a way to stop doing those things or mitigate them to an extent in the future…

I do kinda require JavaScript for the site to look normal. Technically you can read posts without JS…but some stuff will certainly be wonky. One day I’d like to look into how I can make my site play nicely for those with JS tunred off…

I do have all sorts of images without ALTs. In fact, I have a lot of accessibility stuff I desperately need to put time into fixing. Sorry!

I do load some things from other origins (Pictures, some scripts, etc…). You can read about those suppliers here.

What are some other annoying things websites do? Does my site do them? Feel free to let me know, I probably want to fix it, and have it not do that thing. Thanks!