Reading List - Headline Edition

[green_knight]

Title:
Reading List - Headline Edition

Area:
reading list

Summary:
Give paid users access to a pared-down version of their reading list containing just posters, post titles, and tags.

Description:
So between my slow connection and a hectic week I haven't caught up with my rlist. Which now means that I have to wade through several hundred posts.

It would be awesome if I could simply load a page containing authors, headlines, and tags instead of the full list - this would reassure me that I haven't missed anything important from my dw-only friends. It would also make it easier to go back whenever I think 'I saw something on my rlist before my browser crashed/I shut down my computer' (which happens on occasion).

It would also make life easier for people using netbooks or smartphones.

Personally, I'd be happy with author/headline/tags rather than adding 140chars (or whatever - a brief chunk, anyway) - but that might be a matter for depate.

Poll #5183 Reading List - Headline Edition

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 56

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
38 (67.9%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
5 (8.9%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
2 (3.6%)

(I have no opinion)
11 (19.6%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[azurelunatic]

No tags, but try http://www.dreamwidth.org/mobile/read for something immediate that's possibly useful.

[azurelunatic]

... and my "with changes" is "add tags to the mobile reading page", I think.

[green_knight]

+1

Wow. I had been looking for a mobile solution, but apparently had been looking in the wrong place. So DW is ahead of me. (Not for the first time). (I'd still want the tags, because tags are useful, but this is going to be very useful indeed.

[faithofone]

Me too.

[elf]

If this could be extended to the Network page, that'd be glorious. I'd love to look for interesting posts outside of my normal readlist without being bombarded with image-heavy rss feeds and long essays outside of cut tags.

[ninetydegrees]

Oh, yes, please.

[cesy]

You could probably grab the relevant bit of custom CSS from my style and add it to just your Network page, if you wanted this all the time for that page.

[snakeling]

The problem with hiding it with CSS is that you have to load it anyway, and elf is on dial-up.

You could modify your theme layer to not display the entry text, but it would have to apply to both reading and network page, because afair, they're the same as far as S2 is concerned.

[matgb]

Yes, but a paid user can have another working layout that does this for Reading and Network pages and simply add the S2ID to the URL to see it.

Have a look at my journal in my style, click the 'pale' link and you get a basic version of my layout designed for those weird people that prefer white on dark. That persists across links, for reading, etc.

I'm pretty sure I could code a Reading page that doesn't show entry, I think it's even possible to truncate entries to a max of X characters.

Thus I don't know what to tick, I think my 'with changes' is get someone to knock something together in S2 then write a howto.

[marahmarie]

We did this on LJ, didn't we? Wasn't it - oh, now I recall, it was s2 to truncate your own feed, not the content of the reading page (what we called our Friends page). OK. So now I have to change my "Other" vote to "implement as-is"....

Stupid brain fog.

[fu]

Network is based on the reading page, but you can do something like:

If ( $p.view == "network" ) {
# stuff
}


to make the appearance different. So it is technically possible *G*

[snakeling]

I like my network page feed-free, too, so I filter it by adding ?show=PC at the end. I have no solution for long uncut essays, though :/

[starwatcher]

.
What a cool idea!
.

[cesy]

If anyone wants it, my current style does this. Zesty also offers a similar option. I would love for it to be added as an option to all styles.

[instantramen]

Include blurbs and I might actually use it on my phone; otherwise there's just not enough information for me to see the point in this versus DW Mobile.

[holyschist]

From a non-phone POV, I would want a blurb of some kind + tags. Titles alone isn't quite enough for me to decide whether to read something.

[solitarywalker]

It seems like something like this works against any attempt to make DW a community. The people on your reading list are supposed to be friends, or interesting, or entertaining, etc. Making it easier to skip stuff just really seems opposed to that. If you have too many people on your reading list, pick some and remove them.

[matgb]

So you think it's best that someone who's been offline for over a week should have to wade through everything because of an attempt to make DW a community and not be able to get any sort of summary to find the old stuff?

I don't think that's what you meant to say, but that's what you have said.

If I'm away for a week, I strip my reading page down to a few key filters to make it manageable. The otehr alternative, as proposed, to give someone a summary of all posts so they can skip through to find out if someone in their community has said something really important.

Which I think will help build a community.

Alternatively, who are either of us to decide how someone else should use the site? There are already so many separate communities on here, with some overlap, and different people use it in different ways.

More than half of my usage is as a feedreader for off site content. You, on the other hand (with this account) have a very small amount of content.

If you miss a weeks worth of reading, catching up is likely easy. But for those of us that get frustrated if there isn't something new each time we hit refresh, making that cut would defeat our main use of the site.

[holyschist]

Alternatively, who are either of us to decide how someone else should use the site? There are already so many separate communities on here, with some overlap, and different people use it in different ways.

+1

[azurelunatic]

Well-said.

I do Twitter import entries. I don't expect even my personal friends to necessarily read those, especially not the friends who have already read that on Twitter, let alone the people who are subscribed to me because I have intermittent essays about things of interest to them. Contrariwise, I don't expect the people who are reading my journal for the lists of fic I have read and liked recently to want to hear more about my personal life than they got in the Twitter/Delicious import.

[holyschist]

Just because I usually find someone interesting or entertaining does not mean that when I'm trying to catch up from a week on vacation that someone's post about what they cooked for dinner last night as as important for me to read as someone else's post about their aunt dying. It doesn't necessarily mean I have too many people on my reading list (although I probably do), but that in certain circumstances, when one cannot read everything, one may still feel it's important to read some things and this would make it easier to find those.

There are already posts I skim over, even though I read other posts from the same people. DW has been working on the ability to subscribe to specific tags, iirc, which is another way to help people be more selective in their reading, and the widespread use of opt-in filters, ditto. If I don't opt into someone's diet filter, does that mean I should just drop them entirely, since I don't want to read everything they post?

I'm sort of baffled by a definition of community that requires that everyone be interested in everything everyone posts all the time, which is kind of how what you're describing sounds.

[azurelunatic]

It's here! Organize > Manage Filters. You've a paid account, so you can set up tag-based filtering. http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=76

[holyschist]

Spiffy! I have definitely missed some feature announcements over the past year (and don't have a burning desire to use that one, but I'm sure someone else will).

[green_knight]

I am... kind of boggled at the suggestion that one should stop interacting with people to be more social.

[solitarywalker]

Having so many friends that you need a new feature to make it easier to ignore most of them isn't my idea of social.

[green_knight]

I could write a long reply about how sometimes, despite one's best intentions, one can be short of time, spoons, or internet connection, but I won't bother.I find your suggestion that I should cut people from my life entirely instead of selecting which of their posts to read when life interferes offensive.

[kerravonsen]

Agreed.

[ninetydegrees]

Reading page =/= friends. A Reading page is friends talking about their personal lives, people talking about their interests, chronicles, articles, literature, music, art,... I'm not interested in *every* post which is on my reading page but that doesn't mean I'm not interested, period.

[zing_och]

My reading page is not my community, it's people I read. DW as a whole isn't my community either. Not everyone's interests are interesting to me all the time - I scroll by lots of things, like posts about fandoms we don't share.