Ask HN: Favorite text heavy blogs the are a joy to read

joshmarinacci
yesterday
37points
After ten years I’m working on a redesign of my personal tech blog. I want to look at some other blogs with good modern design. Of course searching for ‘well designed blogs’ or ‘webdesign 2026’ brings up endless marketing listicles. Even after wading through the crap, the advice is focused on advertising and product centric sites, not prose heavy sites with good typography.

So my question to you is: What are some of your favorite text heavy blogs that are a joy to read?

I don’t mean the content (though that helps too), but rather sites where the actual experience of reading is pleasant. Think: good fonts, sticky headers (or not), well formatted code snippets, and responsive images. Slide in navbars vs inline table of contents.

Thanks, - j

16 comments

Comments

jonjacky1 hour ago
https://dfns.dyalog.com/n_sudoku.htm

Explanation of Sudoku in APL. Lots of information, absolutely no clutter. Entire page is nothing but text in a single precise sans-serif typewriter font, the same size and strength for everything: headings, explanation, code, and tables. Typewriter font includes mathematical symbols.

jonjacky1 hour ago
https://sites.gatech.edu/alexburgin/on-self-respect-by-joan-...

Dramatic sepia photograph contrasts with understated gray text on light gray background with lots of empty space.

jonjacky1 hour ago
https://www.datagubbe.se/short/

Header, body, trailer panels with three complementary background shades that soften the large black sans-serif typography.

RickSyesterday
Lesswrong for both sidebars: the heading based TOC on the left, and the margin notes on the right: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bJ2haLkcGeLtTWaD5/welcome-to...

For interactive / code snippets Maxime Heckel: https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/the-study-of-shaders-wit...

Honorable mentions Maggie Applebaum https://maggieappleton.com/ai-enlightenment Marek Chotoborski https://zanlib.dev/blog/number-inputs-in-react/

Line width, sane fonts, avoiding clever shit unless very polished, gets you a long way.

joshmarinacciyesterday
Wow. Maxime’s site is gorgeous.

Thank you

faizmokh19 hours ago
I like reading Julia Evans blog. Aside from the good writings, I think the typography and the paragraph width fits nicely.

https://jvns.ca/

deckplecksetteryesterday
I like the design of https://dbushell.com/blog/

Though mainly I just like the general 50s aesthetics of it, rather than specific UI elements.

laladrik15 hours ago
This one looks good to me. https://matklad.github.io/. Coincidentally the author has recently posted about CSS for blogs https://matklad.github.io/2026/06/04/css-unavoidable-bad-par....

I have my own blog, but I'm unhappy with its design as well; therefore I'm not sharing it. Nevertheless, I find particularly challenging two things: 1. Make tables readable from a smartphone. There are a few tricks which allow you to make a responsive table. However, those tricks implies that you use <ul> or <div> instead of <table> which defeats the point of having a table. 2. I had an article where I needed to put a tiny mind map. Eventually I put it as a picture, because the solutions to draw a mind map with JavaScript made the page as twice as heavy.

b00paliciousyesterday
Here is a decent collection of some text heavy personal sites. Not affiliated in any way: https://mnmm.xyz/
sammygutierrezyesterday
hiAndrewQuinn15 hours ago
Gwern's website changed my life at least 12 years ago by introducing me to spaced repetition, which solved my greatest bottleneck at the time: very smart and totally unable to remember anything in the moment to actually apply those smarts to. I'm glad I got the opportunity to finally remunerate him some very small amount after he set up a Patreon or what have you around the time of that Dwarkesh podcast. There are like at least a dozen other works on there that were formative for me too, very highly recommended.
genericacct16 hours ago
Came here to say this, absolute best blog typography in the last 30 yrs
ktrnkayesterday
I like the formatting and readability of https://nesbitt.io/2026/05/28/protestware-for-coding-agents.... though I wish it loaded faster.