Shipped Lots of Improvements to IH
by Courtland AllenYou may have noticed a few improvements to IH recently:
- The loading quote is gone from the homepage. Instead, the content appears instantly. Still got a few glitches to fix here.
- You can add h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6 headings within your posts using Markdown by beginning a line with ##, ###, ####, etc.
- You can also add inline images to your posts using Markdown's image syntax.
- You can also add inline images to your comments.
- Everyone can add header images to posts now, not just people who have a sufficient number of points.
- You can finally delete your product pages.
- Forum posts have gotten a big aesthetic upgrade and look better than ever. I've been trying to find a design that works well for both short discussion posts and long-form blog-like posts, and I think I've gotten pretty close.
- This is a bit invisible, but I did a bunch of technical SEO stuff and plan to keep working on it. Google should start picking up more of your posts sooner or later.
- If you make a post, people who follow you will now see that post in their daily community digest. I haven't enabled the community digest for everyone, but when I do it should be meaningful. Many of you have hundreds or thousands of followers.
- Posts have their Open Graph / Twitter Card images again, so they look great when shared on social media. Hopefully I'll have time to add some more random images.
- The homepage now more clearly divides milestones/products vs forum posts. Still lots of work to go here. I want to properly unify milestones and products into one cohesive feature. There's a lot of valuable information being shared via milestones that would be great to be able to sort, search, filter, etc.
- I replaced infinite scroll with pagination on most pages, so you can actually scroll to see the footer now.
- Comment text and upvotes buttons are a bit bigger now on mobile, which should make them easier to click.
- Lots more stuff I've forgotten that I've done.
Of course, there are still a couple dozen things you've all been asking for over and over again that I'm going to get to eventually:
- changing your username
- changing your email address
- changing your product pages' names/URL
- saving drafts of posts
- bookmarking posts
- subscribing to posts
- RSS feeds
- an API
- better meetup features, etc.
- better search (almost done with this)
- various performance fixes
And then there are a few things I'm building that nobody's asking for, but that I think everyone would benefit from regardless.
Suggestions are appreciated, as always! Although I'm going on a much-needed vacation next week, so I might be slow to respond.
I'm going to add an open role for a front-end engineer to Stripe's Job Openings page in another couple weeks. Would be great to have some help! 😅
-
5
Thanks Courtland, the updates look amazing. Thanks especially for killing the infinite scroll 🤣
Would be great if we could mention products in posts as we can currently do with users. I realize this would be a little bit more difficult however. 🤞 Unless this is already possible and I'm missing it.
An API would be great, maybe an opportunity for me to build IndieHackerNewsDay 😀
-
1
I'm not doubting it's horrible, but I'm curious - why is infinite scroll horrible, again?
Is it just not on trend anymore, or...?
-
2
Not sure about trends, but I've always disliked infinite scrolling, there are very few instances that it makes for a good user experience.
-
1
It's one of those things that tech-savvy people particularly hate, that most normal Internet users don't tend to mind. I'd put it in the same category as exit intent popups and modals. 😂
But off the top of my head, infinite scroll's disadvantages include:
- prevents you from ever seeing the bottom of the page, which means if footer information is included there, you can't get to it (easily solved by putting footer info in the sidebar)
- loads a ton of data on a single page, eventually slowing down your browser
- doesn't give you a shareable link to a page of content
- very hard to return to a previous spot in the list if you got there by scrolling down for a long time
- doesn't work with Google's crawlers, as they don't scroll
The advantage is:
- people will probably see more content, because it's easier to scroll than to click to the next page (e.g. I rarely click page 2 on Hacker News)
-
1
The advantage VASTLY outweighs any disadvantages.
-
1
I've never met a "normal" user who likes exit intent pop-ups (or pop-ups in general). Most just don't know how to avoid it and some, including me of 15 years ago, see them as a good reason to shut down the computer altogether and do something else.
-
-
-
4
Great update !
I liked the quote feature, but it slowed down too much the page.
However, can you considere to add a quote (because it was inspiring) in the top of the page, or on a side (like a widget) ?!
thanks-
1
Technically challenged person here. I loved the quotes too. And I did not mind waiting, for the most part. Any other way that I can see those quotes pop in randomly?
-
1
The quote wasn't slowing the page down, I think it was collecting the data from the api and then rendering it.
-
2
Yes and no. You are correct that, while the quote was visible, the site was loading data from the API and also booting up the Ember app to actually render the page. Without the quote, I still have to do both of those things, and it still takes the same amount of time.
However, I'm now also pre-rendering the UI on the server side, and showing you that static HTML instead of the quote. So you can technically see and interact with the content instantly now, before any of the front-end API calls and rendering kick off.
-
1
Ah you're right, I always look at my notifications first before checking posts and that seems last to load.
Posts seem to load a lot faster now.
-
-
-
-
2
Looks like someone’s on fire! 👏👏👏
Loving the changes, both the improved performance and the UI tweaks.
-
2
Immediately noticed that the loading quote is gone now. Good stuff!
-
2
Just a small bug
The index html has localhost dev-server links.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://localhost:10000/?prerender=1">
<meta property="og:image" content="http://localhost:10000/images/shareables/home.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="http://localhost:10000/?prerender=1">-
3
Good catch! Will fix.
-
-
2
Amazing! Have a great break.
-
1
"I replaced infinite scroll with pagination on most pages, so you can actually scroll to see the footer now."
It fixed my issue of page jumping to the top on scrolling up (back) interviews on Android. Thank you very much!
-
1
Awesome work ❤️
-
1
Great work! Gonna miss the quote feature though, would be great to see it elsewhere in the app
-
1
Hey @csallen everything with IH, this platform and your podcasts have been an absolute game changer for me, I can’t thank you Enough!
Have a great vacation!!
-
1
Nice work mate 🙌
-
1
"content appears instantly" - that alone is worth gold. Quotes were good but UX was totally being interrupted, to the point when I was switching to check Twitter while IH page was loading.
Great work!
-
1
No suggestions. Only praise for your hard work. This community is getting better and better!
-
1
The loading quote is gone from the homepage. Instead, the content appears instantly.
Glory!
-
1
Congrats on all the improvements. That’s a massive list.
-
1
I am so jealous that you get to work on making IH beautiful as your full-time job :) Thanks for making all the updates. Keep on crushing it!
-
1
Great stuff. Enjoy vacation!
-
1
Nice! This is actually a lot of stuff I've been asking for.
The loading quote is gone from the homepage. Instead, the content appears instantly. Still got a few glitches to fix here.
Page speed improvement is an huge plus for tons of people and nobody would complain about! The previous crazy slow page loads (30+ seconds at many times) were the worst UX I've ever willing suffered repeatedly and now the problem seems to be mostly gone!
You can add h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6 headings within your posts using Markdown by beginning a line with ##, ###, ####, etc.
This is also something I asked for (or actually reported as what I thought was a bug in the markdown conversion). The update has fixed old posts of mine.
I replaced infinite scroll with pagination on most pages, so you can actually scroll to see the footer now.
I love this one. It also means I can refresh a page without having to re-scroll and wait to load results.
-
1
Lovely. Nice one!
FYI - For some reason my notification counter always displays one more notification than I actually have.
-
-
1
Very nice, looking at all these things you shipped is inspiring. I need to go code.
-
1
I, for one, will miss my beloved daily quote feature!
-
1
Brilliant!!! Thank you so much <3
Would love to hear more on the Stripe stuff when its up
-
1
Great job @csallen.
And oh my god, what an opportunity to get to work with you. WIll keep an eye on the job opening page. -
-
1
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
-
1
This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
