11–20 of 22 posts
> "I'm not a huge fan of some of the infinite scrolling things that are happening now. I think it's really annoying to want to read partway through, and then you navigate away, and can't get back." Yep; could not agree more. One solution to this problem could be adding some pagination information to the window.location while you scroll, like the list item you're currently looking, but that creates a new problem: if y…
> "I'm not a huge fan of some of the infinite scrolling things that are happening now. I think it's really annoying to want to read partway through, and then you navigate away, and can't get back." Yep; could not agree more. One solution to this problem could be adding some pagination information to the window.location while you scroll, like the list item you're currently looking, but that creates a new problem: if y…
On modern browsers, you can fix that by using HTML5's replaceState function.
Do you happen to know then why popular sites like Facebook aren't using this approach to preserve infinite list position when going back? There probably is some big disadvantage i'm not seeing.
Really interesting article. Thanks for posting it! Lately it seems almost everyone of his articles has been really well thought out and insightful. Does anyone know if this is what he does fulltime? I assume so seeing as how he said he spent a solid month and a half on the money chart.
Yep: Where did all this start? I was going through old math/sketching graph paper notebooks and didn't want to lose some of the work in them, so I started scanning pages. I took the more comic-y ones and put them up on a server I was testing out, and got a bunch of readers when BoingBoing linked to me. I started drawing more seriously, gained a lot more readers, started selling t-shirts on the site, and am currently…
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Yep: Where did all this start? I was going through old math/sketching graph paper notebooks and didn't want to lose some of the work in them, so I started scanning pages. I took the more comic-y ones and put them up on a server I was testing out, and got a bunch of readers when BoingBoing linked to me. I started drawing more seriously, gained a lot more readers, started selling t-shirts on the site, and am currently…
The important lesson here is that some business models absolutely do work for the particular person. I have no idea what number of pageviews you would need to support a full-time t-shirt selling business. I imagine the conversion rate is frighteningly low. But it really is true that you can make a business out of any sufficiently highly-trafficked website with a sticky audience. But you have to match the costs with t…
xkcd has sticky content, too.
Randall is a great guy with lots of really nice stuff. That said there is an absolute glut of xkcd stuff on HN compared to other sites that get mentioned here. xkcd links handily outnumber even wikipedia. One of the HN originated memes is the obligatory xkcd link.
http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=xkcd&st... shows 285 stories and 1,303 comments matching 'xkcd'.
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On modern browsers, you can fix that by using HTML5's replaceState function.
Thanks for the tip; i've only worked with the hash and hashchange event before. It seems the window.history object has quite a lot of goodies for this kind of manipulation :D Do you happen to know then why popular sites like Facebook aren't using this approach to preserve infinite list position when going back? There probably is some big disadvantage i'm not seeing.
For another thing, it's a bit more complicated to implement (you need to have a valid URL for every little piece of every page on your site) for not a lot of benefit that most people would notice. In fact, if you don't do them really well, it might confuse people when their bookmarks don't take them to the start of the page. They're sort of the awkward middle child between permalinks to an index and permalinks to posts, and even if they were there people wouldn't want them as often as the other two. This would probably put it in the "Maybe get to this later" pile.
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On modern browsers, you can fix that by using HTML5's replaceState function.
Thanks for the tip; i've only worked with the hash and hashchange event before. It seems the window.history object has quite a lot of goodies for this kind of manipulation :D Do you happen to know then why popular sites like Facebook aren't using this approach to preserve infinite list position when going back? There probably is some big disadvantage i'm not seeing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the tip; i've only worked with the hash and hashchange event before. It seems the window.history object has quite a lot of goodies for this kind of manipulation :D Do you happen to know then why popular sites like Facebook aren't using this approach to preserve infinite list position when going back? There probably is some big disadvantage i'm not seeing.
For one, widespread support for that feature is relatively recent -- in fact, it's slated for the next version of IE. For another thing, it's a bit more complicated to implement (you need to have a valid URL for every little piece of every page on your site) for not a lot of benefit that most people would notice. In fact, if you don't do them really well, it might confuse people when their bookmarks don't take them t…
Not to say that I don't agree with your conclusions about infinite scroll -- I'd much prefer sensible pagination.
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Thanks for the tip; i've only worked with the hash and hashchange event before. It seems the window.history object has quite a lot of goodies for this kind of manipulation :D Do you happen to know then why popular sites like Facebook aren't using this approach to preserve infinite list position when going back? There probably is some big disadvantage i'm not seeing.
For one, widespread support for that feature is relatively recent -- in fact, it's slated for the next version of IE. For another thing, it's a bit more complicated to implement (you need to have a valid URL for every little piece of every page on your site) for not a lot of benefit that most people would notice. In fact, if you don't do them really well, it might confuse people when their bookmarks don't take them t…
I'd like to point out, however, that FB already does some kind of similar trick with the URL hash when browsing photos: if you open someone's photo, it'll open in a modal dialog where you can navigate to other photos and this in-page navigation _will_ change the URL hash. If you go to that modified URL directly (or refresh the page) FB will show a different page (inside the person's "album") with that photo.
I'd reason that, for FB, a photo is more of a tangible thing than an item in your infinite stream, thus it deserves separate URLs when browsing the them.
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Thanks for the tip; i've only worked with the hash and hashchange event before. It seems the window.history object has quite a lot of goodies for this kind of manipulation :D Do you happen to know then why popular sites like Facebook aren't using this approach to preserve infinite list position when going back? There probably is some big disadvantage i'm not seeing.
what chc said plus load times, it would take like 6x longer to load such a web page and as chc points out most of the time you don't really care, now if there was a way to say, take me back to that state or just take me to the top... that might be interesting but that's way too complicated for the average user. (Maybe a FB+ addition)
Also, yes, i agree in that it could be perceived as a strange behaviour, but to me the current behaviour is also quite strange: if i'm scrolling down the FB stream, triggering a couple of stream sudden enlargements, then go somewhere else on that tab, and then go back to the FB stream, the browser will remember my last scroll position on that page and will try to scroll down to where i was, unfortunately that position does not exists when the page is loaded so it ends up scrolling to a seemingly random point in the middle of the stream (actually it's the bottom of the stream when the page loads, but that triggers a stream-append and then it's not the bottom anymore), not where i was before nor at the start of it (at least this happens in Firefox).