Echo JS 0.11.0

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fcambus 3805 days ago. link 2 points ▲ ▼
That's a difficult question, and I'm still unsure of what to do regarding this topic.

Lamer News has served Echo JS well for the last two years, it's pretty solid and works as intended. Unfortunately, the development is stalled as Antirez is obviously focused on Redis. For bugfixes and small patches, I think it would be better to commit them to the original repository, so other sites running Lamer News would benefit from the changes as well.

After two years though, I have to say my experience with running Ruby applications in production has not been that great, managing Ruby versions and gem dependencies has been painful. I've been thinking a few times about porting the code to another language, and for the record there is a Perl port of Lamer News so it has been done before. Now, though, not sure there is an immediate benefit in doing this. Another option might be to build something new on top of the API, generating pages server-side using the existing API, and completing/enhancing the API if required.

To be honest I would not change much to the actual implementation though, and stay as close as HN as possible.

At the moment, what I would really like to add is a way to view all the latest comments on a site wide level in order to encourage discussions.

What features do you have in mind?

Replies

arnorhs 3805 days ago. link 3 points ▲ ▼
There are a few features that would be nice:
- Pagination (or infinite scroll) of the front page
- Top stories of the past week/month reddit style, for people who don't visit that often
- I'd personally like markdown or more formatting in comments, so you could actually discuss code. And then possibly using a non-monospaced font for the text body
- I also wonder if you could do something to make the loading of the detail page (comments page) faster using ajax or (gulp) have a SPA type of scenario (though this might be driven more by the want to have a js-centered website, more dynamic for its own sake, as opposed to knowing that that would actually make anything better)

Off the top of my head. If I have more ideas/arguments I can add them.

Thanks for making this site btw. I think it's great
fallanic 3803 days ago. link 3 points ▲ ▼
I agree with the first 3 points.

I think the 4th one is less of a priority for now, but it will probably be a good idea as soon as people will start posting source code in comments.

Thanks for the ideas, and feel free to share if you have some more ;)
fcambus 3803 days ago. link 2 points ▲ ▼
Some interesting suggestions indeed, thanks for your input. I believe front page pagination should be a top priority, and switching to a non-monospaced font for the comments as well.

Regarding the later, I really like Open Sans [1] these days. Does anyone have advices or suggestions regarding typefaces?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sans