In my tinkering with the website this week, I polished up another feature that's been half-finished for a while and available in some places but not others: Next Unseen. It's a simple link that takes you to the next new comment or reply that you haven't seen yet.

If you're one of those people, like me, who likes to work through the forums and read everything thread by thread, this should make life a lot easier. When you click Next Unseen, it first checks your notifications. If you've got notifications for new replies or posts in discussions you're involved in, it'll take you through those first.

Once you're caught up on notifications, next it'll check the New Comment Threads list. That's the list of the most recent 1,000 or so comments grouped into conversation threads (by top-level comment). It's very fast to search (properly indexed!) It'll also respect permissions, so something in a class or private area that you don't have access to won't get flagged as New and won't get included when you're jumping through unseen comments.

If you're caught up on all of those, lastly it'll start digging through the older stuff. That's where things get interesting. For me, it currently goes back three or four months to things I still haven't read. I'm trying to catch up, but you guys keep posting stuff faster than I can read it. I think Kevin has actually managed to get through everything and reach my "you've seen ALL of the comments. Go home. Now." message. That's basically the end of the Internet as far as I'm concerned.

You'll find the Next Unseen feature in several places around the site. The Forums link in the top menu will show New when there's something relatively recent that you haven't seen. You'll also see an Unseen link next to Forums on the home page, and once you're reading an individual thread, you'll find Next Unseen both near the top and all the way at the bottom. I especially wanted that bottom link because that's how I read the forums: read the whole thread, get to the bottom, click Next Unseen, repeat.

One important distinction: seeing New in the menu doesn't necessarily mean you've got 20 years of unread material waiting for you. The site has comments going all the way back to 2007, and I don't want the menu screaming NEW because you never read somebody's Access question from the Bush administration. The New indicator is intended for relatively recent activity. If you really want to keep going after you've caught up with the recent stuff, Next Unseen will happily start taking you farther back.

This is just one more little improvement I'm making to make browsing the forums easier and more user-friendly. These are mostly spare-time projects that I tinker with when I have 20 or 30 minutes to kill, but enough little improvements eventually add up to a much nicer site.

One thing I'd still like to tackle when I get some free time is a better comment editor. Right now you've basically got a plain HTML text area. I'd like to add some basic formatting tools and make posting a little nicer. I do have an old HTML WYSIWYG editor that Alex and I can use, but I barely use it anymore and don't particularly trust it. Most of what I publish to the website these days gets sent directly from my Microsoft Access database. Go figure.

Nobody has really complained about the current editor, though, and you know me: the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I've already heard from a couple of you who like the newer jump-to-the-latest-comment behavior and the blue highlighting for comments you haven't seen, so I'm curious whether you actually use these navigation features too.

That's today's 20 minutes of website tinkering. Give Next Unseen a try and let me know what you think. And as always, if there's some little feature that would make the forums easier or more enjoyable to use, let me know.

Now back to recording videos... :)

LLAP
RR