---
title: Web functionality
emoji: ⚙️
summary: Features of websites that are interesting or useful.
draft: false
tags:
- WWW
- web
- webdesign
- interactivity
- design
---
## Asterisk Magazine

I love the design of [this magazine](https://asteriskmag.com/), the simple colours & design (as well as their ethos), but one little feature particularly is super intriguing!

On [any article page](https://asteriskmag.com/articles), if you highlight a block of text, an asterisk will appear which will let you bookmark that chunk of text — _entirely locally_. It stores the data in your browser's DB, so there's no data going back to the magazine about what the most highlighted section is, which is always nice.

I haven't explored this feature a lot, but I'd be interested in exploring whether the highlights can survive edits of the article? What referencing mechanism they use for storing the locations of the highlights? (Is it a [CFI](https://idpf.org/epub/linking/cfi/epub-cfi.html)?) Can you manually export your highlights later, in a format that allows for citations? It's all quitr exciting.

## Offline only

This [blog post](https://chrisbolin.co/offline/) from Chris Bolin, and a magazine (referenced in the article) that extended from it are designed so that you can _only view them when disconnected from the internet_.

I _love_ this idea. I'd probably make it so that you had to have been offline for a short while (say, 5 minutes) before you could engage with the site (perhaps showing a flowering bud that takes 5 minutes to bloom, before you can start the interaction), so that the temptation to just flip your wifi on and off all the time isn't there — otherwise this could just become an annoyance?

I'd either let people click links but 'save them for later' (when they're back online), or keep the interaction totally within the site.

## Styling RSS feeds

I've used the recommendations on [this site](https://claytonerrington.com/blog/adding-some-flare-to-rss/) to ensure the RSS feeds on this site look pretty too! (Stick `index.xml` at the end of any page listing posts to see what I mean, eg [byjp.me/posts/index.xml](/posts/index.xml).)