Hide and reveal entries on Reading page

[green_grrl]

Title:
Hide and reveal entries on Reading page

Area:
Reading page

Summary:
The little triangles on the Inbox page that allow you to collapse or reveal the full text of what's in each entry? Add that function to the Reading page. Ensure that "collapse" or "reveal" persists in later views.

Description:
Subscribing to someone's journal is a mixed bag. You did it because she's an amazing writer. Maybe he always collects the most interesting links. Maybe you're good friends from back when, although you have different hobbies now. So there are many posts by your Circle member you want to read. Unfortunately s/he also posts a gazillion memes uncut, lengthy descriptions of fights with little sister, and/or highly intelligent thoughts about a fandom you've never even heard of and don't care about.

Multiply by entire Reading Circle, and there are numerous posts to skim past quickly to get to the ones you want to read.

If people were perfect about their tagging, it might be possible to just get notified of the entries you want to read. But they're not. Even if they were perfect about it, sometimes it's just one of their tags you'd want to exclude. And sometimes you might be less pressed for time and willing to take a chance on that long essay about the fandom you never heard of.

I love those little triangles in the Inbox. I want them on my Reading page--to be able to quickly skim my Reading page and collapse the entries I'm not interested in down to just poster and title. Then I would be able to go through the entries I really want to read at leisure, and not worry about missing one tucked between two I'm skipping past quickly.

As I skip back entries, or as I re-log in, I would like the collapsed entries to stay collapsed.

Poll #932 Hide and reveal entries on Reading page

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 59

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
25 (42.4%)

Should be implemented with changes.
16 (27.1%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
9 (15.3%)

(I have no opinion)
7 (11.9%)

(Other: please comment)
2 (3.4%)

Comments

[distractionary]

I really like this idea.

[cesy]

Javascript to be able to collapse as well as expand might be useful, but remembering which entries to collapse would be a huge thing, technically, and is not worth the bother, IMO.

[yvi]

It sounds shiny, but the technical work behind that is giving me the shivers. Still thinking about how to vote :)

[yvi]

Hmm, requiring JavaScript for the Reading page is a bad thing, in my opinion.

[montanaharper]

I'm not against this, per se, but I honestly don't see the point. Collapsing and expanding comment threads, yes, but on one's reading list? Not so much. It doesn't strike me as being that much effort to just scroll past entries that aren't of interest, as opposed to the (admittedly minimal) additional effort of an extra click to collapse them and then scroll past.

Am I missing something?

[azurelunatic]

There's not much physical effort, unless one has hand mobility problems. There's a certain psychological effort to scrolling past text without reading it, at least for me -- there are all these WORDS and ordinarily I would be reading them, but I already know I don't want to, and/or I know that if I do read it, I won't be happy.

When I'm scrolling to skim and skip, I'm always a little anxious that I'll scroll too fast and miss something important from a different entry.

From a design psychology level, I'm wary of any argument against a feature that says "It isn't that hard to X, why don't you just..."

[green_grrl]

People on my list tend to have very busy entries--changed fonts/sizes/colors, big photos, scrolling glitter text, long, long paragraphs. If I can grasp in a second that I'm not interested in that entry and collapse it, then it reduces the visual distraction, lessens the amount I have to scroll, and lets me focus on the simple, one-line cut entry underneath that I am interested in. And after I have scrolled down and up the page again, I can find that simple, one-line cut entry again easily.

[zvi]

I'm concerned about javascript making the page slower or more difficult to render. It's not that big a deal if I'm on a foreign computer and can't get to my inbox, because it chokes on javascript, but I would be v. upset if it happened with my reading page. Also, would this be restricted to the reading page or also apply to the network page? What about other accounts' reading pages?

[green_grrl]

Speed of loading I don't know anything about. That would be a definite negative.

I was just thinking personal Reading pages, but that's my main DW interest.

[ciaan]

I'd say put it everywhere.

changes

[susanreads]

I was going to vote "as is", but then I read the comments about how difficult it is technically and requiring Javascript. But I really want to be able to collapse reading page entries, for the reasons given in the OP, and because feeds show the whole entry (whether there was a cut in the original or not) and I want to go to the original site (where the comments are) to read them.

How about:
• have a collapse button at both top and bottom, so you don't have to scroll past whichever direction you're reading in ... or a "top of entry" button at the bottom and a collapse button there
• don't remember the setting, because it sounds as if that's the database-heavy part
• if someone doesn't have Javascript, the button(s) just won't do anything.
Is that possible?

Re: changes

[cesy]

That sounds like it would be a lot easier from a technical point of view.

Re: changes

[7rin]

*goes to change vote to "with changes"*

Re: changes

[kyrielle]

I like this.

Would the persistence be difficult if it were in a cookie, I wonder? that wouldn't work across browsers, of course, and I think it might present "OMG how much data in cookies?" issues, but...figured I'd throw it out as a thought.

[allen]

I've never really done much with styles, but couldn't you get all of this functionality except for the persistent collapse through S2? (Assuming that the style were trusted and could use JavaScript, that is.) Or is the persistence a key feature?

[kate_nepveu]

If I were using this, the persistence would be a key feature. I tend to close & reopen my reading page dozens of times in a day.

I like the idea but not at the expense of addressing other, simpler problems that are keeping me from moving my posting here.

[distractionary]

Would it be possible to add code by each entry that wasn't just an arrow (like in the inbox) but was somehow explained to be "collapse this entry" – that would reload the page with the entry collapsed?

I really don't know any of the technical details, and I don't know how Javascript works, so I don't know if it's any different or easier for slower connections to reload the page instead of loading the entire page with Javascript from the start. And it could be a problem if your reading page had new entries on it between when it was originally loaded and when it was refreshed.

Another question: with the Javascript version described as above, would it be easier and less intensive (in terms of load and coding effort both) to remember the setting while the session is active and forget it when that window or tab is closed?

[7rin]

I vote for "remember the setting while the session is active and forget it when that window ... is closed."

[scemo]

I would just about marry Dreamwidth if this was implemented. It'd make the reading list so much more interactive, y'know?

(Though it'd all be a lot less useful to me if the reading list doesn't remember which entries have been collapsed... the entire idea, to me, is that when I go back to my rpage, I don't see the entries I've already read/don't plan to read.)

[ivorygates]

I am so in favor of this, especially the part about how your action would be *persistent*. For one thing, when you're scrolling back to catch up to the eleven million posts you missed in the last week, collapsed entries, in addition to ensuring you don't have to read the annoying posts, could be used to let you know which posts you'd actually read...

[7rin]

"collapsed entries ... could be used to let you know which posts you'd actually read"

I would so marry DW for this. And have little DW babies too. D'you want our first born as down-payment? ;)

[poulpette]

The zesty theme actually does something of the sort though it collapses all entries and expand them one at a time on request. The collapse mode is made persistent through an option in the customisation wizard.

Maybe the OP's request might be explored from a S2 perspective, a la Zesty? With the adjunction of a killfile to target specific users and/or communities to collapse automatically?

I'd love to be able to collapse only feeds and communities while keeping users entries expanded.

[cesy]

You can actually already achieve something a bit like that with a variant on qilin's code in http://dw-nifty.dreamwidth.org/2627.html

It allows you to code which types of entry you want collapsed, and then you can open any you want to read in a new tab. You can see an example on my reading page.

[ciaan]

This is seriously one of the best suggestions ever. I would love to be able to collapse things I've already read and don't need to see again, and I would LOVE to be able to collapse or remove certain things I don't want to see at all. And I'd definitely like for it to persist for at least a while as I click around (both the "until window closes" or the "24 hours" options sound fine to me). There's almost no point to it if you have to re-do it every time you load the page.

I do agree with the concerns about Javascript and how the functionality shouldn't slow anything down too much.

What would be even better is if there was one setting to collapse/expand an entry (so that something I had already read would only be shown by title, but I could still see if there were new comments I might want to check out and so on (so I am imagining that a collapsed entry would show title, poster, and comment count, rather like putting all the body behind a cut)) and also a way to totally remove an entry from showing up at all. I'm not sure exactly how that would work because I don't know the code, but it would basically tell the reading page to stop pulling that entry into the feed, the same way a filter can tell it to not pull content from a certain journal, and then it would completely disappear and never be there again and no longer count (so that there would still be 20 entries instead of 19). Maybe a little arrow for collapsing and an X for removing?

I also like the idea of being able to load the reading page with feeds and/or communities or whatnot already collapsed, and then expand them if you want.

[7rin]

I support almost all of this, with the exception of "also a way to totally remove an entry from showing up at all" - at the very least, I would want to see the title/the first line (or two - or paragraph) of posts without titles.

[inarticulate]

I think I would definitely be more interested in this if it were linked to specific styles (a la Zesty), a setting in the preferences area, or …okay, grammatically this doesn't work, but if a CSS function was made public where I could block that for my personal style, so that I could opt out my personal read-list. (To clarify: I already have issues with the inbox function, and expanding that to the read page as a site-wide mandatory function is… undesirable for me personally, but I do understand why people would want it.)

[triadruid]

So sort of like a reverse lj-cut? Interesting idea, but I'm really unsure about the execution.

I definitely would want any implementation to be as persistent as possible. I check my reading page 5-25 times/day from up to 4 computers.

[7rin]

While I very very rarely check from more than one computer, I agree that this should be "as persistent as possible."

[elizabeth_rice]

I'm against this idea. See, if people find that they are skipping half or more than half of the entries made by any particular user, then they should probably unsubscribe. Anyway, users can track other journals via tag or all new entries made (which is about the same as subscribing but at least the notices go to the inbox where you may mark entries as read even!).

[green_grrl]

But what if the 49% of the entries are really, really good? Or if 80% of the person's entries are good, but the 20% are over-the-top annoying? And as I said, not everyone's good about tagging, and even if they are, you can't subscribe by "exclude $tag". Re: subscriptions, mine go to my email, which I check far more often than my Inbox, and it would get quickly overwhelmed with stuff I really, actually want to read on my Reading page.

[sky]

This is a shiny idea in theory, but would probably be very useless to me because quite honestly... almost all the people I read on DW (and LJ) never use the subject line of their entries, or if they do use it, insert something irrelevant to the actual topic of the post. So even if I went down collapsing things, I'd just have to open them all back up to find out what was in them. So many people seem to do this, myself included, that I wonder how useful the feature would actually be.

[green_grrl]

The way I would use it would be to quickly skim down all the entries first. If an entry looked interesting--I want to go back later and read the whole thing or click the cut--I'd leave it expanded. If I read a few lines and realized "not interested," I'd collapse it. It wouldn't matter then if there was a pertinent title or not; I'd already seen the expanded entry and decided I didn't want to read it.

[rivenwanderer]

This is super-belated, but I think that a Greasemonkey extension could probably take care of this, though it'd only be able to manage the collapsed/expanded state for one browser. So if it's not added, maybe see if the Greasemonkey world can help you with it?

(I was mentally toying with the idea of learning/using Greasemonkey to do something pretty similar for my friends page, but realized that I needed that time & energy for other stuff...)

[foxfirefey]

I think a Greasemonkey extensions could do this pretty well, come to think of it, considering how the CSS on core2 styles has been implemented.