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.