Tracking Updates

My brother Rolly suggested that I make active conversations "sticky," meaning they stay at the top of the list on my site.  It’s a good idea and I’ve been thinking about it over the past week or so, because for example this dialogue went largely unnoticed.

I’m not going to change the order that the posts are displayed in; I want the newest numbered post to always be on top.  Instead I’ll create a short list of links to the 5 most recently updated posts.  This was actually trivial to code; it took under an hour, and most of that was deciding how to format the list and keep it short.

The hard part is deciding where to put the list.  I love this new "spring" layout, I love how clean it is, and I don’t want to complicate it at all.  I honestly can’t think of anywhere really good to put this list (suggestions are welcome).  For now, I’ve made it a slidey menu on the "blog" link.  This isn’t ideal because the slidey menus can be disabled.  It also isn’t ideal because I want to keep the menus smallish, which means I need to abbreviate post titles, and I can’t include the author of the update, nor can I indicate whether the update was the creation of a new post or a reply to an existing post.

And I really want to use "yesterday" for posts that were updated yesterday, instead of the month-abbreviation followed by the day, but "yesterday" is far too long; I’d have to abbreviate the subject even more.

Anyway... I think it’s an awesome feature, I’m just not certain where its permanent home should be.

Posted by Anthony on 6 replies

Comments:

01. Mar 10, 2004 at 03:23am by andy:

since you’re using yesterday, and the date format for things frequently updated seems a bit clunky, why not script for "x days ago" as long as days >2?  so yesterday still shows up, but it’d make it easier to read i think,

Title
updated x days ago,
by y

the box serves it’s purpose but it seems itself to be a bit clunky where it’s located presently... though i don’t know what else you’d do with it. 

possibly also make it removable with a pref and move it into the top?  (one line per post)

02. Mar 10, 2004 at 04:07am by Anthony:

Between the time I created this post and Andy’s reply, I put the small box you see on the right side of the page, just beneath the "Online X / Today Y" section of the navigation bar.  Previously, I only had this "updated posts" stuff in a pop-out menu on the "blog" link, as I said.

I actually think this little box on the right is half-decent looking.  At this point I don’t know if it’ll stay or not.  Of course, since Internet Explorer is a gay piece of crap, it won’t flow the text around the box; instead, the first post doesn’t start until below the box.  Whatever, I don’t have time to play the "debug Microsoft’s crappy software" game right now; I have better things to do, like sleep.

(And about the "x days ago" idea... with the way I’ve got it now, I don’t like that.  If I were going to put the word "updated" in front, as I first had it, then I’d like it, but I removed that in the interest of narrowness.)

03. Mar 10, 2004 at 04:09am by Anthony:

Hmmm, maybe instead of over there on the side, I can take the four 3-line blocks and orient them horizontally, and put them right under the black navigation bar... ok, back to sleep.

04. Mar 10, 2004 at 08:07am by Rolly:

Nice work!  I like the box in the right corner.  You can see the recent posting action and the latest blog.  I guess it depends how large your window is when IE is opened.

05. Mar 10, 2004 at 12:03pm by andy:

that’s definitely better, the dotted border feature of css was never my favorite but it seems to work =P

that seems much less in the way though.

06. Mar 10, 2004 at 05:59pm by Anthony:

Apparently, setting the width to 100% on the blog posts was causing the IE problem.  Removing that width setting allows the first post to flow to the left of the recent-activity box on the upper right.  It is truly phenomenal how numerous and varied the bugs in IE are.

Anyway... what about the version on the blog link?  Any thoughts/opinions on that?

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