What are the best-designed personal blogs you’ve come across?

https://maggieappleton.com/ for her take on a digital garden. She also compiled more below [0] if opening your thought process to the public is your thing (adopting the concept actually got me to add more structure to my serious notes and actually post more)

https://brianlovin.com/writing/how-my-website-works because of how in-depth he went with hosting his notes, bookmarks, and other projects.

https://wattenberger.com/ for its reactivity/place for her d3.js experiments.

and here is a general collection of dope blog additions: https://brainbaking.com/post/2022/04/cool-things-people-do-w...

My overall advice is unless you're a designer flexing your skills is to focus less on the design and more on the actual writing! The internet is littered with the emaciated husks of nice good looking sites hosting nary an entry beyond "How I Made My New Blog With X"

[0] https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners

Ome of the best I came across, regarding both readability and content:

https://ciechanow.ski/

http://danluu.com/

https://www.gwern.net/

Best is entirely subjective. ;) I'm quite fond of my own(1), but it's pretty basic and heavily modified/hacked together from a very minimal wordpress theme.

Let's start with the two you mentioned: looking at the source code, one's actually built from a squarespace theme, and the other is likewise built from a wordpress theme, feels like an slightly older one given it's not mobile responsive. That's not a knock, by the way - sometimes you want an audience that don't use phones or deliberately flock to the retro vibe.

I don't know your budget or capability to self-code, but browsing squarespace's themes would be what I would recommend if you have a higher budget, and likewise doing the same with wordpress if you're operating on a shoestring mindset. There's some gorgeous ones on both, though squarespace is far more curated and caters to a more modern/slick looking audience and clientele.

(1) (SFW) art log: http://log.kradeelav.com/

https://julian.com/

https://poohitan.com (in Ukrainian but there are several posts in English)

https://www.nan.fyi/

https://garden.bradwoods.io/

https://ivov.dev/

I really like how the side notes and references line up on the right.

https://verdagon.dev/blog/hybrid-generational-memory

Browsing through these can be inspiring:

https://webring.xxiivv.com

My friend’s https://cmhb.de/ and then I’ll shamelessly add in mine https://manuelmoreale.com/

https://www.jakobmaier.at/

https://sambleckley.com/

https://www.t3x.org/

https://tonsky.me/

https://acko.net

https://anonystick.com

Some links I've saved. That said, there's no accounting for taste:

https://tylr.fun/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30440123

https://world.hey.com/dhh/google-suffers-from-a-digital-petr...

https://vpostrel.com/

https://h3rald.com/

https://bastian.rieck.me/blog/posts/2022/boring/

http://diveintohtml5.info/storage.html

https://moxie.org/stories.html

https://trevorklee.com/my-terrible-plan-for-reducing-opioid-...

https://mzrn.sh/2021/11/14/how-i-helped-build-a-profitable-m...

https://kilianvalkhof.com/2021/web/prescriptive-software-is-...

https://jessitron.com/2021/11/28/software-development-pushes...

https://www.tariqislam.com/posts/kubernetes-docker-dep/

https://p4bl0.net/post/2022/01/The-Truth-on-the-Blockchain

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/what-are-the-most-beautifu...

https://alexgaynor.net/2020/nov/30/why-software-ends-up-comp...

No list would be complete without:

https://thebestmotherfucking.website/

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

I really like DF's theme, even though it looks terrible on mobile