blocvox-troopers • proposal by mendeza

0/1

This vox by mendeza on behalf of blocvox-troopers is endorsed by 1 of them and denied by 0.

OK, feedback for Michael. - Don't force these little boxes to scroll just to achieve consistent rows - it isn't worth the annoyance to the user - Instead try something like isotope.js - http://isotope.metafizzy.co/ - Would be good to support Github-flavored Markdown (or at least Markdown) - Make it more obvious how to add posts - I guess this is pedantic, but the plural of _vox_ is _voces_ - Don't pretend to be real New Yorker, you California boy ;-) - I am so proud of you for hanging in there with this project; you are a true patriot and citizen I'll try this on phone and tablet and report on those experiences later.

Reference

Isotope 71 Pro Progressively enhanced for CSS3 transforms & transitions

Bloc Replies▶ • Member Comments (6) • Respondents • Share Share • Flag

Discussion among the blocvox-troopers.

mike • Great feedback, mendeza! Thank you! My thoughts follow. - "Make it more obvious how to add posts." I've heard this several times and I agree. - Voces. It is pedantic, but definitely worth mentioning. I try to be proper in my use of language (as arbitrary as it may practically be). One issue is that I hope "vox" to take a on verb semantics. How then would one write the past tense? Anyway, for now I'm gonna stick with "voxes" in site copywriting. It's follows the usage of the common word "box", and Steven Pinker said prescriptive language rules should be taken with a grain of salt. :) - Markdown/rich formatting. I agree and it's on my radar. Others have mentioned this as well. Also mentioned was why voxes don't have titles. Adding rich formatting would solve that too. Did you suggest Markdown for implementation ease? Or do you think the general public would find it preferable to a rich text editor? 11 years ago
mike • - New Yorker. Haha, yeah, I deserve to be called out for that one. Though in my defense I only called myself a "New Yawker", a spelling no native New Yorker would be caught dead using. 11 years ago
mike • - Grid cell scrolling and Isotope. This layout and scrolling behavior is actually an attempt to balance several concerns. General background of the layout is that I wanted a system that mimicked the old-school newspaper layout editor's job: arrange articles on a page such that *more important articles get more space.* Additionally, I needed a layout system that would respect a given ordering of items. (That meant a row-oriented system would be preferred to a column-oriented system like Pinterest's, which jumbles up the order.) Why not isotope? I wanted to convey the relative importance of each vox with finer precision than the coarse squares Isotope provides. On Blocvox, importance is derived from the number of endorsements a vox receives, effectively allowing me to reward/incentivize blocs that produce strongly-endoutrsed content. (That is, in fact, the kind of content that sets Blocvox apart from, say, Twitter.) [Continued] 11 years ago
mike • Only an ordered treemap algorithm achieves all of the above. So the height of each row is actually based on the number of endorsements of each vox in that row. With the current data on the site, this is not apparent. Here's an example that better demonstrates the flexibility of the ordered treemap: <http://scrambledbrains.net/files/20130806treemap.png>. So why the scrolling? It's actually a consequence of the need to prioritize SEO. In order to give search engines more content to index, I render the entire content of each vox that appears in the treemap. But search engines frown upon websites that stuff extra content in the HTML that is not actually visible on the page. To make sure I'm not breaking any rules, I make that content visible via scrolling. [Continued] 11 years ago
mike • I'm open to alternatives that fulfill the same needs. A different approach I've considered is simply to truncate content that overflows, and instead show an "expand" icon or link, allowing the full details of that vox to be shown in a modal overlay. To me, this feels like more of a stretch of the search engine rules, but maybe it could work. Would that be more usable? Thanks again for the great feedback! 11 years ago
mike • Few more notes about grid/scrolling: The user isn't forced to scroll. They can opt to follow the "Detail Page" link that appears on hover. I've also considered allowing users to switch to a linear layout (like the one used on the Proposals page), though this gives the user more decisions and I don't want to make them think. Perhaps that option could be buried on the Settings page. Would this help? 11 years ago