Journal Journal: Wolf Spider 1
New JonesBlog update. Wolf Spider
New JonesBlog update. Wolf Spider
New JonesBlog update. New Eyes
New JonesBlog update. Creech AFB UAV operations
New JonesBlog update. MacBook Air
New JonesBlog update. Super Tuesday plus a bonus, lunch with Dylan and Paul
New JonesBlog update. Shot Show 2008
there are 2 huge wins here for everyone... the first is retention of context. You can wade into a thread, retrieve more comments, change your threshold, all without losing your place like you did in the old system. And using the WASD keys to navigate makes it very easy to peruse discussions in a number of interesting ways. mouseover the help text in the floater for more information about how they work. We're open to suggestions on how this should work- i'm not totally happy with it yet... but it *is* possible to mash a single key and go from start to end of a discussion, which pleases me.
the second is that the default users see the highest score comments first. You can change this by logging in and toggling the retrievable order to oldest first, but for most people this means that the first comments they see will be the best. There are so many great comments on Slashdot, but most users don't see them because they are buried within the discussion. I think this goes a long ways towards helping.
A final word about the ads in there- unfortunately there are ads in the new system. Changing from a static page-page-page system to a dynamic ajax system with a single 'page load' causes us to serve hundreds of thousands of fewer ads. We worked out roughly how long people read discussions and are trying to strike a balance so that you see roughly the same number of ads under this system as you would have under the old one. We'll tweak it of course, but we gotta pay the bills here people!
And obviously all of this is a work in progress. Pudge is leading development work on this. The next project is to make it possible to post without losing your place in the discussion, and then to refine navigation keybindings and thread expansion/contraction controls to make the whole UI clean. We appreciate constructive criticisim. There are bugs (especially in IE, but almost no slashdot user runs IE) but we're mashing them out- thanks for your feedback on them. As we sand off the rough edges I think you'll all find the new system a vast improvement if you just play with it for a bit and give it a fair chance. Not all change is bad
New JonesBlog update. Utah State Capitol
New JonesBlog update. Blood donation
New JonesBlog update. Ruben Adler 1940-2007
New JonesBlog update. Christmas Eve
New JonesBlog update. Cupcakes
New JonesBlog update. SLC Photowalk #4 pics
New JonesBlog update. Talk at SCI
New JonesBlog update. SLC Photowalk v 4.0
Dynamically binding, you realize the magic. Statically binding, you see only the hierarchy.