Pre-release feedback

[lasermind]

Hi!

Thanks for the invitation to have an early look at the webpage! Great project, especially these sort of Stack Simulators blew me away. This is really helpful to begin to understand this whole Bitcoin script stuff.

So, if you’re keen on my feedback at this stage, here we go! The topics are in a pretty random order.

1. I saw that you used CSS blur on the page. I'd advise against it, due to the sheer fact, that it uses a ridiculous amount of CPU/GPU power. CSS blur is not well implemented at the moment and I don’t know if it even can be. Look at the charts:

You can try for yourself, I’m sure you will see the same effect. Don’t stress users devices (and drain battery on mobile) just by displaying a blurry effect. On plane objects, usually 0.1 less opacity will also do the trick. – Also: The blur on the secondary menu produces a glass-like look and feel that does not fit the page very well. From a design point of view alone, I also would recommend to omit the blur here.

2. Speaking of the secondary menu: there is a small gap that needs to be closed in a feasibly way. It’s off by 2px for some reason.

3. The breadcrumbs in the secondary menu are all lower case. It’s a break in style, if you ask me. They currently seem to just reflect the URL name anyway. I don’t know if you plan to change that at some point. I hope you do. At least put text-transform: capitalize; on the <a> elements.

Some things about spelling:

4. Your whole section is called "Bitcoin Topics". This is your given name for this project. You should always write it in the same way: "Bitcoin Topics" or "Bitcoin Topic", when in singular.

5. The spelling of {b|B}itcoin in English: "bitcoin", with small-letter "b": it's when you use it for describing the coin or the currency itself. "I lost all my bitcoin in a boating accident." "There’s a hard cap of 21 million bitcoin." (Unless the word is placed at the beginning of a sentence or line, of course.) "Bitcoin" with capital letter "B": is used, when you refer to the network or the software project as a whole. "The Bitcoin network." "There are 21 million coins in Bitcoin." "There is basically no on-chain privacy in Bitcoin." "Technically, there are no bitcoin in a Bitcoin wallet." Use it consistently throughout the whole website. Also given names, like "Bitcoin Core", are written capitalised.

6. "Welcome!" There is a full space between letter and exclamation mark. This is considered a spelling mistake – unless you’re French. 😉 And even if you’re French, you have to admit that it kind of looks bad and is even technically problematic, especially in digital texts today. That’s why the recommendation in France is actually to use the Narrow Non-Breaking Space character for this purpose (espace fine insécable). Actually, this would be a good typographic standard internationally – and historically it even actually was. But we don’t have to overthink this; long story short: since this is an English text anyway, stick to the English writing conventions: take care to not fall into the habit of using spaces before the punctuation marks.

7. The Ampersand (&). Don’t use it, just because the character itself looks somehow visually pretty. It is no suitable substitute nor shorthand for the word "and". These two things are not interchangeable. (And as we see, it wasn’t even used consistently on the webpage. 😉) The sign was intended to be used in company names, or for (person’s) names in a very specific, very close relation. Please don’t use it randomly and don’t abuse it, neither in normal paragraphes, headlines or menu items – or your growing texts will be more and more troublesome to read in the future.

8. Oxford Comma. It seems like you chose to use the Oxford Comma convention. Was it intentionally? If so, be aware that it may lead to confusion, when having lots of commas in a (short) list of words. I would advise against it. Use less commas, but use them where it gains understanding or dissolves ambiguity. The English language (or writing conventions) are not very strict about placing commas, so it is no mistake to use it in a case-by-case fashion.

So, to sum this up: the first introductory sentence, I would suggest it to be written like this:

Welcome to Bitcoin Topics, your go-to resource for understanding Bitcoin, privacy and decentralization. We're here to break down complex Bitcoin concepts and provide straightforward explanations to help you navigate and master Bitcoin.

9. It seems the font file "Caveat" was not loaded as intended. Worst of all: it defaults to Comis Sans on Windows. 😂😭

But I wouldn’t recommend using this font anyway, because it is of pretty low readability. I’d suggest looking into one of the Playwrite fonts instead, like Playwrite Hrvatska, for example. I have the feeling that it fits and contrasts the main font of the site very well.

10. Have you noticed, that the secondary menu skips very oddly when clicked or touched? It really shouldn’t do this.

On Mobile	On Desktop
mobile-menu-scrolls-skippy.mp4	sidebar-menu-skippy-when-clicked.mp4

11. At the bottom of the secondary menu, there is the "Subscribe" button. But it barely fits in the container and is even covered by the scroll bar. I think, a line break will help here, to place it below the input field. And maybe make it a "real" button, not just clickable text.

12. The Bitcoin OpCode Explorer is genius, but I had a hard time figuring out what the buttons were meant to do. 😆 My suggestion is, to change the button icons to make it more intuitive. Instead of rewind | play | fast-forward, maybe do back | show again | next.

13. Your articles have headlines, of course, like in newspapers.

In the English writing conventions, headlines are written in a certain style, called "headline case" or "title case". It rules how words are capitalised in a headline. There are different styles. The most common in International English is the "Chicago Style". Your headlines should either follow that style – or simply be in correct English spelling and not everything muddled together. But the most important thing is, that it is used consistently, to be visually appealing and even have logic in it. You can check and "convert" your headlines to Chicago Style here: https://capitalizemytitle.com/style/Chicago/

14. I was wondering: this code example here, is this really "javascript" (by the way: "JavaScript")? Or is this merely pseudocode to illustrate the matter? Also I do believe, that there should not be empty counted lines, especially at the beginning and in such a short example snippet. It looks kind of odd …

15. Here you meant to use an En Dash, instead of a normal Hyphen or Minus/Hyphen. These "inserted thoughts" are useful in a text, but they should be started and left with the correct character for this application.

16. Generally spoken, there are a lot of smaller errors and typos; I can’t screenshot them all here for you to correct. If you tell me which repo I could fork and make Pull Requests to, I offer to proofread the texts and make corrections. But I also don’t want to distract you right now at the current stage of the project with this. If you want me to take care of it, drop me a line at a certain point in time, when you see fit for this.

17. There is a bad breakpoint between 1024 and 1280. The post-article navigation could need a little bit of padding here.

18. Here the text sais something about a "coloured rectangle", but all the graphics are in black-and-white. I was confused here. 😂 But I guess this whole section is also not completely finished yet (because it also does not make a lot of sense at the moment.)

Ok, this is my pre-release feedback so far. I hope you can make something of it and it helps to improve the project. It looks very promising and I’m looking forward to studying the contents more in the future.

Thanks for your work!

✌️ L

[jrakibi]

Thanks for taking the time to dive deep into this.
Appreciate the detailed feedback, I'll make sure to address everything you've mentioned in the next release