Slashdot Keybindings, Dynamic Stories

We've been working hard on the new dynamic Slashdot project (logged in users can enable this by enabling the beta index in their user preferences). I just wanted to quickly mention that there are keybindings on the index. The WASD and VI movement keys do stuff that we like, and the faq has the complete list. Also, if you are using Firefox or have Index2 beta enabled, you can click 'More' in the footer at the end of the page to load the next block of stories in-line without a page refresh. We're experimenting now with page sizes to balance load times against the likelihood that you'll click. More features will be coming soon, but the main thing on our agenda now is optimization. The beta index2 is sloooow and that's gotta change. We're aiming for 2 major optimizations this week (CSS Sprites, and removing an old YUI library) that I'm hoping will put the beta page render time into the "Sane" time frame (which, in case you are wondering, is several seconds faster than that "Insane" time frame we're currently seeing).

Comments

Re:Feature request --

[Hatta]

I emailed Malda about this when it was first implemented, here's
what he said:

The feed should contain stories you've tagged. The idea is that this
is a place where you can share content you like with others.. so if I
go to ~hatta I see the slashdot YOU think I should see. But you're
right in that your comments should be in that page as well. There's
technical reasons that they aren't, but we're going to try to fix
them.

Doesn't make any sense to me though. I've always considered my user page to be for my own benefit, not others. Slashdot isn't myspace. I never read anyone else's user page, and I doubt anyone reads mine. But there you have it. His solution for people like us? Bookmark slashdot.org/~username/comments.

Re:lynx

[Anonymous Coward]

fbi (part of fbida)

http://linux.bytesex.org/fbida/

Re:Special button

[TheRaven64]

Hey, at least blocking kdawson from the front page works again now. For a few painful months, it didn't work with index2.pl and there was no way of switching back to the original. Fortunately, now you can block idle and kdawson from the front page.

Re:Feature request --

[TheRaven64]

Why not just set it to send you a message when someone replies to one of your comments? That way, the front page tells you how many new messages you have. That said, it would be great if:

1. You could jump directly to the page with the reply from the messages list page, rather than having to go via the message page.
2. Messages indicating replies to the same post could be grouped.
3. The messages system actually let you send messages to other Slashdot readers, so you didn't have to post your email address in a discussion you wanted to take offline.

Re:Slashdot looks weird

[ScuttleMonkey]

The story tag is to distinguish stories from submissions and comments.

Among other datatypes. The firehose is our content delivery tool and pretty much any page is just becoming a filter on the firehose to display whatever data you are asking for. This allows us to do a lot of really cool things (both now and in the near future) and get some performance hits back soon.

worksforme

[daemonburrito]

D2 and the beta index are working great for me, aside from the hiccup with the comments pane a couple of days ago.

I would like to see meta-moderation revisited, as this is the only way to mitigate coordinated group mods. Since the old mm system was dropped, I've seen an uptick in bizarre moderation.

I know my karma is going to take a hit for this, but I had to say it. Taco, you're doing a fine job. KDawson, I don't hate you. We understand why you have to do Idle. All in all, Slashdot is pretty great.

Re:Special button

[RulerOf]

Hey, at least blocking kdawson from the front page works again now.

Please share the Zen.

Can I block him from my RSS feed too?

GreaseMonkey hack to fix user pages

[PCM2]

A while back I wrote a GreaseMonkey script to switch the User page back to the old behavior. With this script installed, when you click on your username you go immediately to the comments list, like how it used to work. Try it out and send me feedback if it works/doesn't work for you.

BTW, IMHO this whole effort to "modernize Slashdot" has been a total disaster. I have all the new Indexes turned off, but the UI is still much worse than it was before they started playing around with it. The old layout plus the Slashdotter plug-in did everything much faster and more smoothly than the new code has ever done. Please, PLEASE Taco et al ... just give it up!!

Re:Stop auto-updating?

[Anonymous Coward]

slashdot.org/palm

Re:Slashdot looks weird

[Anonymous Coward]

Is meta-moderation going to be fixed at some point? Some of us are getting a bit annoyed by activist mods modding stuff they disagree with as 'Troll', and getting away with it.

Re:Feature request --

[girlintraining]

Why not just set it to send you a message when someone replies to one of your comments?

Other than the fact that the feature doesn't work? No reason.

Mod parent up - this is slashdot.

[argent]

This is "news for nerds", not "I can't believe it's not gmail".

I had set my Slashdot options tuned down until I had a nice clean low-graphics high-content interface with a minimum of surprising keystroke stealing. Every update to Slashdot has made it mankier and flakier. How about a Slashdot lite classic mode that backs things up to about 2002 or so?

Well

[Mystra_x64]

Still no UTF-8? Oh well...

I don't think we need images in comment titlebar's also (even though I overwrote it with UserCSS but still).

Re:Well

[Yvan256]

Indeed, not using UTF-8 is one of the things that annoy me the most about Slashdot. For a website that's supposed to be run by nerds, it's just shameful.

Re:Slashdot looks weird

[Red Flayer]

well, then among the many "cool" updates on the way you will appreciate the work that is currently being expended to make low-bandwidth, small screen, iphone, etc, interfaces much less buggy and faster-loading. :)

Not to be cynical/snarky, but is there an expected timeline for this?

I mean, it's not that I don't appreciate the work expended, but I'd appreciate the finished product much more :)

Even a tentative schedule (while probably a bad idea to commit to showing to users) posted somewhere might give us a better idea of where we're heading on slashdot, and why we have to put up with so many strange UI tweaks (like most of us, I prefer to stick with what I know).

Re:Feature request --

[shutdown -p now]

I never read anyone else's user page, and I doubt anyone reads mine.

I do read other people's user pages when I want to look at their... that's right, comment history.

I certainly don't care about what stories they've tagged. Why should I?

Re:Feature request --

[jc42]

My question is, how long until we have the capability to post pics on slashdot?

How long until we have the capability to post UTF-8 text to slashdot? I've had several comments recently where I've wanted to include a bit of Russian or Chinese or Japanese text, because it was relevant and would eliminate the need to talk around a direct quote that would help people who could read the other language (or feed it to babblefish ;-). But we're still stuck back in the day of ASCII text, with maybe a few diacriticals used by Western European languages.

For that matter, earlier I wanted to use a <sup> tag to get proper exponential notation, and that didn't work, either. Some geek/nerd site this is ...

UTF-8 FTW!