Keeping Up
Let’s say you drop in on Ricochet over morning coffee, read a few conversations, add a comment or two, then go on with your day. Later, you come back to see what’s new, and to see how the conversations you read earlier have progressed.
If you’re like us, this involves a test of memory:
“Let’s see, did Duane Oyen’s post have 53 or 57 comments?”
“I did read Claire’s post, ‘Dressing for Turkey’… didn’t I? And was it a recipe or fashion tip?”
“What was the last comment I read on that post by Marybeth Hicks?”
You don’t need more things to remember, do you? Well, we’re here to help.
For starters, we’re working on adding New Comments Indicators to conversations: little, bright orange numbers that appear right after the total number of comments. So if you read a conversation in the morning that has only 23 comments and then in the afternoon it has 35 comments, you’ll see “Comment (35)(12)” at the bottom of the post, with the 12 in bright orange.
Note that we’re not basing these calculations on when you last visited the site, but on when you last opened each conversation. This, I’m told, involves some nifty technical gymnastics. And we have to implement this so it doesn’t delay loading the main information on your page. The net result is that (a) you’ll immediately know if there are any new comments; and, (b) you’ll see which conversations you’ve already read. Eventually, clicking on the New Comments Indicator will take you to the page where the new comments appear, with the new comments highlighted in some manner.
This feature will be restricted to members for mainly technical reasons: we need some way to identify each reader so we can calculate and serve up all these customized numbers, and we see cookies as presenting reliability and performance issues. So, users have to be logged in, and the only mechanism we have for this is through membership.
We have other features planned to help navigation, but I’ll save their discussion for another post.
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Comments:
Jun '10
Re: Keeping Up
Sounds kinda nifty. Why, though, don't you put the site menu that runs across the top on the bottom as well? That way when one gets to the bottom of a page, one could, without scrolling back to the top, click MAIN FEED, MEMBER FEED, HEADLINE, ETC., from right down here below where I am posting my comments. Also, and maybe this new tool will solve that problem, but if you had comments pages at the top as well as the bottom, one could click on Pg4, for example, of an extremely active post and go to reading comments that are new. But this tool you are describing seems like it will take care of that issue.
Thanks, this site is getting more fun all the time.
Sep '10
Re: Keeping Up
Perhaps an indicator as to when members are making fun of cats, so KTCat and I can swoop in and deliver some frontier justice.
May '10
Re: Keeping Up
Great suggestion, cdor. This week it'd especially be useful with Thanksgiving coming up. Just don't have much time to surf.
I'm all for the cat alerts, too. Bring 'em on. Have you noticed that the same lowlifes (or is it lowlives?) make fun of both cats and redheads? Shred 'em, Pseudo.
My personal wish is for a "please rescue this conversation" button for those of us who always get left making the last comment. Nothing lonelier than being left whistling in an empty virtual chat room. Reminds me of those dreaded middle school years when the cool kids casually wandered off whenever the geeky kid showed up. :-) Yup, just used an emoticon. I'm daring that way, even though I know it marks me as tacky and unsophisticated... Hello? Hello? Did everyone leave the room again?
Re: Keeping Up
I'm still here, Diane. But getting out fast because no one else is here.
Re: Keeping Up
Hey, where did everybody go?