8
Jan 14
Popular Reader Question
Hello –
As I ramp up the posting frequency on Popular again (hopefully an ongoing trend, though I’ve said THAT before) I realise I have very little idea about a potentially quite important thing.
If you’re a regular (or semi-regular) reader of the blog, how do you find out about new posts? Twitter? Tumblr? Facebook? An RSS feed? Just popping by now and then? Telepathy? Stalking me? I want to make Popular updates easier to find (and encourage new readers in, of course) but to do that I’d like to know about more about how you find them in the first place…
Any responses would be very helpful! Thankyou!
@90 It does indeed exist but it’s rather hard to find it.
(There’s RSS for popular comments too!)
Primarily via Tom’s Twitter, especially when times are quieter. When things are like they have been recently, I check the site manually a few times a day to keep on top of the comments threads.
Randomly dropping in, mostly. Keep up the good work!
Either I go to Freaky Trigger directly or I check my lj friends list, which includes a feed from Freaky Trigger.
I have started sharing the posts on FB — I’ve done the last two now — and a fight has ALREADY STARTED in the comments :D
By posting that somewhere with a half-decent comment system, you are depriving us of that fight! Maintain Twitter / Tumblr purity!
(It is an awesome fight though)
In future I will try and decant combatants in this direction mid-affray.
Feedly here, too.
Randomly checking or Twitter (as you can tell from this late comment). More Twitter plugging would make me read them more efficiently, I’m sure.
PUT YOUR REDESIGN QUESTIONS HERE
– BTW I agree it’s important to see which thread is which on the front page comments area.
Redesign questions/bug reports here! Thanks.
#102 Fair dos we’ll restore that – probably underneath the commenter name.
i’ve put it above :-( and gonna call it a night for now. we’ll be tinkering more as we go
not connected to the redesign as such – but how do I get a picture as part of my profile (and posts) as some people seem able to do?
edited to add: I now see that you’ve answered that here: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/populist/#comment-1283293
I like the general “look” of the redesign – friendly, poppy, all of that. In the spirit of friendly feedback, my one gripe is that (IMHO) it does a disservice to comments. You can’t pull up the “page 1, page 2” links without scrolling to the bottom, which means that if a thread is currently deep into its conversation, you’re doomed to start in the middle. I really miss the “all comments” link for the same reason.
Also wonder about the handling of commenters’ names…maybe it’s the font, maybe the color, maybe the position, but they sort of camouflage themselves into the top leader of the post – my eye, at least, has a tendency to skip right past them, making it feel like the posts aren’t “by” anybody in particular. That seems kind of unfortunate for such a conversation/community-driven experience as Popular for example. But it may just be me!
I think I agree about the commenter names – harder to make out.
Another small quibble – the font in the comment box is enormous – it makes writing a longer comment seem weird (and indeed makes it harder in terms of seeing what you’ve already written etc.)
In general I love the regeneration of course!
It would be great if there was an “All Comments” button underneath Tom’s entry (apologies if someone has already mentioned this). In general, I find it easier to follow the conversation if I dump all the comments onto one page and read from there, which I don’t think we can do currently.
Otherwise, all looks good. Great job on the rebrand.
‘All comments’ link somehow got lost in the transition I think – will be restored ASAP (I prefer this to going page to page also).
I’ve put in pagination above and below the comments, and in the one above I’ve added a patch ‘All’ link. it’s a bit of a hack, but just a small one that might be easy to improve.
it was lost in cutting out our own code for the WP default comment pagination. I preferred ours, because it wouldn’t “orphan” the last page with fewer than 10 comments (if you get me). but i’m all about reducing the code base if I can and doing things the default way if it means a little sacrifice here and there.
re the gra/vatars – we could show those only for logged in users, and then take away the cryptic and easy-to-miss ‘dagger’ icon currently used to show “not logged in”
Pleased to see ‘All Comments’ back. But I don’t like how the 26th, 51st, 76th, etc comment bring up a new page immediately – there used to be a lag. If I click on a new comment in the sidebar from a thread I’ve been following, and it’s no.76, I have to load two pages to see whether I’ve missed anything else.
Popular posts in particular get enough comments to the extent where I’d suggest increasing from 25 to 50 comments per page.
IZZY – that’s what I meant about our original code not leaving orphans – i’ll have a look to see if there’s a simple way to do that with the WP system.
“I’ve put in pagination above and below the comments, and in the one above I’ve added a patch ‘All’ link. ”
Woohoo! Thanks, Alan!
Have Our Brave Boys broken the new header already?
I’ve taken the liberty of adding some spaces in the title of the post and we’re gonna truncate it too.
MEANWHILE, I think I’ve cracked the orphan comments problem – now it folds in the last 2 pages if the last page would have fewer than 10 comments. If anyone spots numbering issues with the comments, give me a shout.
Something very wonky happening in the Recent Comments down the right – – – seems like the title of each post is ‘joined’ as a hyperlink with the text of the comment above, if that makes any sense.
Meanwhile… am I right that we can no longer tell when the blogs themselves were posted?
the post DATE is in the red circle at the top left of each post (or the first post of the day). the appearance of recent comments is being fiddled with
Have we lost the video links on Popular entries?