SubscribeSite redesign
I’m not too happy with the way my tracking page works right now. I’m tracking 49 conversations, and it’s too hard to navigate and find the new comments. The main conversations page is also too long and there’s no way to go back in time.
I intentionally placed more emphasis on the feeds, mostly because they were the harder problem to solve. Now it’s time to pay a bit more attention to the tracking page.
So I penciled this for the next major release, and started playing around with some ideas. Nothing good so far.
Then last morning. I got an e-mail from Eljo, who came up with an idea for a better UI that’s easier to use, whether you’re tracking two conversations or two hunderd. The e-mail included screenshots, which are now up on the Wiki.
I love it. The new design is just right. You can easily spot conversations with new comments, less scrolling, and if you have more than a week’s worth of conversations, you can navigate back and forth.
This will make all the difference. So big thanks to Eljo.
Posted by Assaf in features on Saturday, March 18th, 2006. You can follow any responses using co.mments, leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Ohad
March 18th, 2006 at 4:14 am
It’s cool. but you have more urgent things to do right now, I think.
RSS doesn’t work and it doesn’t notify you of new comments. in fact, it doesn’t count them at new comments at all.
Assaf
March 18th, 2006 at 4:16 am
Can you e-mail me with more specific information. Which feed reader are you using?
Eljo
March 18th, 2006 at 4:41 am
No thanks I like to be a bit creative some times
@ Ohad:
I read the rss within Bloglines.com and get good feeds. I get a bit of the written column and the new reactions. Strange that you get no feeds?
farlane
March 20th, 2006 at 9:19 am
Great service!
I like the suggested functionality from Eljo.
Assaf
March 20th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
Something gets lost between co.mments and NetVibes. I e-mailed them to see how we can solve this problem.
Robert
March 20th, 2006 at 6:43 pm
I was thinking… And perhaps this has already been suggested… It would be great if, as new comments arrive in conversations, that conversation moved to the top of the list (sorta like in Gmail when you get new emails). I don’t even know if this is possible as the service is designed. Perhaps it could at least be an option?
Thanks! Great service!
~R
Assaf
March 20th, 2006 at 8:41 pm
That’s the one thing I’m struggling with, but it definitely needs to push conversations with new comments to the top.
farlane
March 22nd, 2006 at 7:33 am
You might gain space (and add functionality) by having a link/icon that would simultaneously go to the blog AND perform the “Clear” function. Then again, it could be confusing to people.
Assaf
March 22nd, 2006 at 5:52 pm
Clicking the title of the post already does that, it both clears the new comment list and takes you to that post.
The ‘clear’ button, though, is useful if you want to clear the comments but don’t care to go to the blog.
Perhaps icons would work better. Two arrows chasing each other for refresh (ping), a trash can for remove. Any suggestions what to do with clear?
Kingsley
March 26th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
I love co.mments, but: can I get an RSS feed of all the conversations, including the ones that don’t have anything new? I hope this is a planned feature.
Assaf
March 27th, 2006 at 1:35 am
The solution turned out to be more tricky than I thought, but it also solves that problem. You will get all conversations that you add, and all conversations which have new comments that you haven’t seen yet.
eduo
March 30th, 2006 at 4:21 am
I came to the news part of co.mments precisely seeing if there were any plans for a redesign. I have less than a dozen tracked posts and it’s already unmanageable. Information is huge and scrolling is required for even the most basic scanning for new comments.
Are there plans for email notification of new comments? Not all blogs require this and sometimes a more active notification method would be welcome.
Justin Grunau
April 15th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
I’m definitely having a lot of problems reading my conversations in bloglines.
First off, if I use the “Add to Bloglines” bookmarklet, I’m presented with a couple of dozen feeds, none of which are identifiable as mine (I am registered with the userid “ivstinianvs”, but all the feeds are identified with a non-human-readable generated GUID of some kind).
Secondly, none of the feeds I am seeing in that list actually seem to correspond to MY feed. I was able to figure out which my feed is (I think) by looking at the “Subscribe” button in the top right (which by the way doesn’t work with MSIE — yes, yes, I know: “BAD browser” — MSIE doesn’t recognize the file type). This button shows my feed as http://co.mments.com/track/feed/41378f90-aebe-0128-e4a6-0013720a63b4, which for some reason is not in the list of feeds that bloglines picks up.
Lastly, when I do subscribe to that feed in bloglines, it just shows up completely empty. This is consistent with what happens if I right-click on the “subscribe” button and choose “Save Target As…”. The file I end up with looks like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?><rss version=”2.0″> <channel> <title>co.mments</title> <link>http://co.mments.com/track/</link> <pudDate>Sat, 15 Apr 2006 19:08:52 -0500</pudDate> <generator>co.mments.com</generator> <descriptor>A feed of all new comments in the conversations you are tracking</descriptor> <image> <url>http://co.mments.com/images/track32.png</url> <title>co.mments</title> <link>http://co.mments.com/track/</link> </image> <ttl>120</ttl> </channel></rss>
It would be nice if we could have human-readable RSS feed URLs, like “http://co.mments.com/track/feed/ivstinianvs” or something. That would make it easier to subscribe with a bookmarklet. As for the empty RSS file, it looks like some people have had problems like this, while others are having no trouble. Plus, is there any way that you could verify that “41378f90-aebe-0128-e4a6-0013720a63b4″ is really me?
Thanks!
Justin Grunau
April 15th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
Note also my feed at http://co.mments.com/track/feed/41378f90-aebe-0128-e4a6-0013720a63b4 doesn’t validate on “feedvalidator.org”: http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http://co.mments.com/track/feed/41378f90-aebe-0128-e4a6-0013720a63b4
Assaf
April 15th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Justin,
It’s weird that Bloglines sees more than one feed, there should be only one feed on each page. I’ll have to look into that.
Feed showing up empty, file type mismatch, and the not-too-friendly subscribe button are all getting fixed to tomorrow night. Sunday night during a major US holiday is the least disruptive time I could pick.
Friendly names will be coming shortly, along with the ability to share your trackings with others.
And yes, that tracking page does belong to you.