Ask HN: Favorite text heavy blogs that are a joy to read?
Comments
RickS
wrentopher
Less Wrong is wrong a lot lol.
dieselgate
Is it sort of how stainless steel still rusts... it just rusts, less?
joshmarinacci
Wow. Maxime’s site is gorgeous.
Thank you
faizmokh
I like reading Julia Evans blog. Aside from the good writings, I think the typography and the paragraph width fits nicely.
Suppafly
commenting so i come back here at some point and read some of the blogs people are suggesting. I pretty much haven't found any text-heavy blogs that I enjoy anymore.
hiAndrewQuinn
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.
genericacct
Came here to say this, absolute best blog typography in the last 30 yrs
deckplecksetter
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.
xref
I definitely read that as D-Bus hell
b00palicious
Here is a decent collection of some text heavy personal sites. Not affiliated in any way: https://mnmm.xyz/
zbikowski
https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/ - book design adapted for web
https://practicaltypography.com/ - tons of practical advice on typefaces and text-based UX
https://harmful.cat-v.org/ - more of a "website-style" layout than the above two
realityfactchex
Language Log: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
The simple layout/theme does not get in the way of the reading.
matrix87
for some reason, stripe owns this magazine
jonjacky
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.
laladrik
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.
tga
https://zed.dev/blog (somewhat quirkier, sidebars)
https://tailscale.com/blog (overall clean)
https://arun.is/blog (sidebar, colors)
https://www.vitsoe.com/us/voice (general feel)
https://github.com/TryGhost/Headline (interesting article header, open source)
efortis
I’ve gotten a few emails complimenting the format of this post below. It’s got fragment-links that scroll and highlight the corresponding part in the code snippet.
fabianholzer
I think the website of James Sinclair has some great typographical choices, see the colophon for details: https://jrsinclair.com/about/
jonjacky
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.
ktrnka
I like the formatting and readability of https://nesbitt.io/2026/05/28/protestware-for-coding-agents.... though I wish it loaded faster.
jonjacky
https://www.datagubbe.se/short/
Header, body, trailer panels with three complementary background shades that soften the large black sans-serif typography.
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.