Posted in 2023

Good UX: Non-thinking versus minimizing cognitive load

A common design principle is “don’t make me think”. It might even capture an essential aspect of good (user) design. However, pushed to its extreme, it can lead to some very bad UX and frustrations. In this blog post, I will argue for adopting “minimize cognitive load” as an alternative design principle.

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Enabling giscus comments on all posts

To avoid having to add the giscus comment snippet of the previous post to every post, I want to add it to the page template. To do this, we first need to set up Sphinx to look for custom templates, figure out a good starting template, and then modify it to our liking.

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Allowing comments using giscus

As my personal website is basically a blog, I’d like readers to be able to comment on it. Previously, I used Disqus for it, but I don’t really like the look and feel of it, and when googling around I found that it is also obnoxious with tracking, adverts and generally disrespecting privacy. One of the alternatives that I was quite charmed by was giscus, a solution that uses GitHub Discussions to power the comments and reactions to my blog posts. In this post, I’ll show how to set up giscus for my Sphinx based website.

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Migrating the website to Sphinx + ABlog

Last week I migrated my website from Nikola ( see my post from 2020 )to Sphinx + ABlog. Although it might look a little different than before, the functionality is essentially the same so you might wonder why I decided to do this migration.

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