That is why good web developers offer both paginated views and “Single Page” views…
Funny, I don’t read any differently than I did in the 70s…
Never said they didn’t, but why discriminate against people on PC’s and people who still want to read the way humans have since the beginning of print?
What sane person wants to click through 20 webpages (or scroll) to see 20 posts or 20 items - like online media is notorious for when the do “Top 20 ” lists?
My understanding was that he - like I - is annoyed at hell of having this tiny window of the total content available instead of the whole thing.
SitePoint is now the same experience as what an 80 year old man sees when he reads the newspaper through a magnifying glass. Content comes into view and out of view and you never see the whole thing. Very unnatural with how God designed our vision. Maybe not so much so if you are an eagle or a bumble bee…
That isn’t fair. This isn’t sitepoint’s creation. We exceeded what we could do in our old system and embraced this new one. It is open source so if you desire the single page view you can write the ability if you’d like. There is also a public API that could be used to generate a single page view.
Who knows maybe the software will add it in the future? But I know it is no where on their to do list as of right now.
Maybe if you still read scrolls you have it on 1 continuous piece of paper but i think you would find it hard to get a book printed on 1 piece of paper. They are ‘paginated’ into ‘pages’ for the same reason as webpages. perhaps you have a dot matrix printer with the perforated continuous paper? otherwise if you print it will be on separate pages.
If you want to store useful bits offline that is up to you but i would imagine that it would quickly go out of date and be pretty hard to index. It wouldn’t be on my list of priorities if i ran a forum as i can’t imagine a lot of people doing that.
Not sure i love the new layout as much as the old either but things change, some things are better (quoting etc seems to work well) some things worse - i don’t love the reply box at the bottom of the page.
Bad analogy. Better analogy —> In the business world you don’t send a client a 50 page presentation in 50 different MS Word documents. No, you have everything in one document/file.
That is all I am asking for.
Up until mobile started going crazy, most websites let users choose “View Single Page” because a lot of people prefer to read that way and prefer to be able to PDF/screen-capture ONE page versus spending an hour doing20 PDFs/screen-captures.
I want to save the stuff that is timeless, whether it is good debates or best practices that eventually change but not very often. (There are some real gems on this website and some really knowledgeable people whose wisdom transcends time!)
Well, here is an opportunity for SitePoint to add a feature that there is a always a need for.
One of my latest websites defaults to 15 posts per page, but I also offer a “View All” option where people can get the entire conversation in one page/print/capture if and when they need it. That way everyone is happy, and programmatically it wasn’t that much extra work to offer it both ways. Problem solved!
Post edited by cpradio to remove the unnecessary tone
I don’t see this happening for a very very long time.
Until you have 10s of thousands of posts to load into a single view. That’s one way to kill page load times
I just can’t fathom why someone may want to have 500+ posts printed out. Surely it would be better to bookmark the posts you find interesting or to use something like SpringPad/Evernote as an extension so you can highlight the text and store it to another service?
When any of my websites is so wildly popular it even gets 200 posts on a thread or article then I’ll address that when it happens!
You misinterpret “print”. What I would like is a way to create a WYSIWYG PDF of Articles/Threads/Posts/Comments that includes everything in one file.
I have seen comment trails on newspapers like the Washington Post and LA Times and NPR that read like books and contain eternal knowledge. (Same on SitePoint.)
Unfortunately with sites like SitePoint and anything with Disqus (or whatever), the only way to get that is to do screenshots of about 5-8 posts at a time and then either have to read 20-30 files or spend an afternoon copying and pasting images into MS Word.
On one of my sites, you can get all of that in one PDF. And if I add another stylesheet, you could just get the text if you that is all you want.
I’m not sure why people think these basic needs have disappeared?
People - like me - come back to SitePoint because it offers content and conversations that are useful long after initially published. Why not let people capture that in the original format so that can use it later?
I didn’t misinterpret it. Print to PDF, print to Paper, whatever. Either way, I can’t fathom wanting to store 500+ posts into a single document versus just visiting the topic again (or storing the actual 1-5 posts that I really wanted into an external service such as SpringPad or Evernote).
But yes, I understand that your workflow is far different than mine, and mine is likely different than the next person and so on.
Which is also why we try really hard to never delete anything. So you can always come back to the topic/discussion.
In the begining of print they would have printed on one page at a time as they wouldn’t have continuous pieces of paper (animal skin? papyrus?). Scrolls developed but eventually went out of favour as the paginated book were/are more useful. For the same reason you don’t buy harry potter on one continuous scroll or download the E-book in one continuous page. Even PDFs are paged so you can find what you are looking for and get back to it.
Fair enough except that the forum isn’t the same animal. It’s a changing evolving beast that has things added continually (well unless nothing for 3 months anyway then it’s closed). Most people read the most recent posts or follow a thread and either bookmark or google again later to find the information. Sure somethings are useful for many years but for me i would just search for what i need on google as i might find a different source of information. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree as our ways of using the internet are clearly different.
If your need is to copy and save to where-ever the information on your screen fair enough, that’s up to you and whether sitepoint wants to spend time changing the website to accommodate your need.
You make it so difficult to agree with your concern when you’ve been acting passive aggressively, arrogantly and blaming everyone but yourself.
See above.
A little bit of google searching for “how to save an entire forum thread” led me to http://www.httrack.com/ where if one downloads the app and makes some regex magic, it is very possible to grab a single thread and place it into an archive folder for you to do whatever you want with the content inside (with JavaScript off).
Lots of steps to save a page that’s more graceful than screenshots? Yes. Does it suck? Yes. Deal with it? Yep. *shades*
Being paranoid comes with a price. I know. Expecting everyone to bow to that will only fuel your need to be paranoid when they act like the asses you think they are because of you doing it first. This thread is a perfect example of that notion.
And perpetuating your stress is not very smart or healthy in the long run, innit?
Either way, I know the stress of wanting to horde knowledge and data for fear of sudden poofing. The Wayback Machine is testament to that sentiment. But it’s not perfect and in the end, you have to make up your own solutions if there’s no easy one-button-press fix. However, this is SitePoint. If the datacenter that houses this place goes up in a ball of flames with zero redundant backups, you come find me. I’ll paypal you the money for a beer.
One of my latest websites defaults to 15 posts per page, but I also offer a “View All” option where people can get the entire conversation in one page/print/capture if and when they need it. That way everyone is happy, and programmatically it wasn’t that much extra work to offer it both ways. Problem solved!
So - as it’s been said, Discourse is open source.
Have fun!
cpradio I can’t respond to your question because I find the entire thread architecture so friggin’ hard to navigate it gives me a headache. I’m sorry, I know Sitepoint is trying to . . . well actually I don’t know what Sitepoint is trying to do, all I know is that on a 24" monitor I see about 20% content and the rest dead space. Jesus Christ why can’t we get the old format back? I loved the original colors, and whenever I would contemplate which forum to post a question to, the familiar, attractive Orange/Blue logo and site color scheme would immediately come to mind. I have yet to hear a persuasive argument from any site owner who adopts this flabby, ungainly, undisciplined, butt-ugly forum architecture that it beckons members to participate.
Yeah, and look up. I wasn’t responding to Mittineague. I give up.
I don’t want to rile you any more, but I’m still inclined to suggest you take a few deep breaths and relax a bit. It’s not all that bad. You can read the discussion just like you used to, and go to the bottom to reply. If you want to reply to a specific comment, you can click the Reply button at the bottom right of the comment. What’s hard about that? It’s about as easy and anything can get.
To be fair though, they were confused with the topic reply button versus a post reply button. That doesn’t help semicolon’s problems of clicking the reply button for @Mittineague’s post instead of the one for @cpradio’s post.
Sorry, @semicolon, I don’t get it. Just like vBulletin, as you read and scroll down the discussion, there are Reply buttons on each post, so you can reply directly to that post. That didn’t change. The layout/design/colors sure did, but the operational aspect of replying to a post still exists in the same way.
So you can always come back to the topic/discussion.
