Site Update » Bookmarks · 4:55am Nov 7th, 2014
Not a massive update here, but I redid how bookmarks "work" yesterday. Bookmarks are now per paragraph, which properly stores where they actually are, and will even remember if the author edits their story, as long as they don't change the paragraph you bookmarked (for technical people, I just store a hash of the paragraph, whereas before I stored how far you clicked through the chapter, which meant it would break if you ever changed font size or screen width). This means bookmarks now carry across devices, so you can easily set a bookmark on your PC and then open it on your mobile/tablet and carry on reading. The interface is still a bit crappy for it, but I'm working on it. I also want to make a little page that shows you your active bookmarks you can easily jump to.
If you're not logged in, it falls back to storing locally like it used to, so everyone gets to use this feature. Registered users just get it tied to their account.
Nice! Thanks for your hard work!
This makes me happy
Did you write that snippet of story yourself?
And yeah, thank you very much.
Uh oh. What happens if a paragraph repeats itself later in the story (definitely possible if it's done on purpose as part of the story, eg a short sentence repeated, or a fancy "scene break" ASCII art)?
Not sure if it's worth the trouble to try too hard to survive an author edit. Storing position on the page actually makes more sense to me, and unless the author takes a sledgehammer to the chapter it should still be roughly in the same area.
Side note: Perhaps you can take the idea of bookmarks to improve the current read/unread chapter mechanics? Right now you just open the page and it's marked as read, which is OK until your browser crashes or you close the tab before you finish or whatever. Having to scroll to the bottom of the chapter before it gets marked as unread would solve this, and you could also track the current scroll position and keep an automatic bookmark to track where the user left off. So if they do close the page/crash, the next time they view the story chapter list they get a little icon that'll jump them back to exactly where they left off.
thx duuude
2578861 I already thought of this, but didn't bother to do a fix for it, because I forsee it happening approximately never. I have a fallback route I haven't finished doing yet which will store the number of paragraphs before the selected ones for those times when the paragraph changes, but I haven't really got a plan for duplicated content.
Nice!
Once again another brilliant update from Knighty. You know what they say, right? It's the little things that count!
Thanks a bunch, man.
I haven't yet bothered with the bookmark feature...
I think I might have just found an excuse to try it out, now.
Oooh, this makes me a happy pony! For whatever reason, the bookmarks either never worked for me, or if they did, never worked right in the first place, staying resolutely stuck to the cursor until I refreshed the page. Then they would invariably appear in the wrong place on the page.
Let's see how this new system works.
Props for the hard work, knighty.
Once you get that page up and running, where we see which ones are active... oh yes. Keep programming please.
Pffft; only filthy Casuals don't read a whole 20k chapter in one sitting,
(<---- Filthy Casual,
)
Awesome! So glad it carries across device now, as it is easier than copy/pasting the text to an email to myself so I can search and resume later
Brilliant work as always, Knighty!
That works much better. Thanks for your work!
I can't get over how amazing this site is. And you just keep making it better!
Well now, It looks like saving my place just got that more convenient.
change is good, like cotton candy!
2578920 Speaking as someone who routinely burns through 1250+ wpm for hours at a time... I still don't always finish a whole chapter at a time, so I'm pretty sure everyone on the site is a "filthy casual"
. And somehow I never quite got bookmarks to work before, so it'll be nice to give this a try!
Nice touch-up, knighty.
I've never actually used a bookmark before, so when I marked it, backed out to the story page, and opened the chapter again, I came about fifteen percent of the way toward squealing when it jumped straight to the bookmarked paragraph.
Don't tell anyone.
Cool, the bookmark feature is something I really do like, and it's nice to see it refined.
Thank you. Although I don't use bookmarks myself (I usually download entire stories for offline reading) this sounds like an excellent improvement.
If I read your post right, bookmarks previously stored the absolute position from the top, which would break if the user changed the text size or line height, and now they store the marked paragraph's hash, which would only break if the paragraph were ever edited by the author.
Might I suggest a further improvement? Storing the relative percentage of the chapter at which the paragraph is located as a fall-back, would allow the bookmark to at least get in the right ballpark, if locating the hash ever fails. That way, only a massive re-write/re-structuring of the chapter would invalidate the bookmark - and in that situation, a bookmark would have become useless anyway.
Additionally, depending on how it's implemented, using such a relative position within the chapter as a starting point might speed up the search for the paragraph with the desired hash.
Again, thank you - and I'm still giddy with joy over the revamped "Library" feature.
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Actually, for people who don't know the technical details, saving a bookmark exactly on a scene break is a rather logical thing. And for my stories, scene breaks are all just the same simple centered * * *
I still think simply keeping a paragraph number seems more intuitive. As Aariadon said, even with edits it should still be around the same area anyway.
Hmm. This is odd. I can't seem to put a bookmark on these centered scene breaks at all. The red line indicator simply doesn't move over to them.
This is a fantastic addition.
Oh my god I never even knew this feature existed. I can finally start reading Background Pony.
2579180 It only works on paragraphs, a center element loses the first paragraph (actually a result of shitty bbcode output).
By the way, on a related note... could the "go to comments" link on that same dropdown bar that has the bookmarks thing... actually go to the comments? Currently it goes to the "post new comment" part, below all comments, while there's in fact a different button (with even a different icon) for that already, at the top of the comments
(Not to mention... the keyboard's [end] key kinda takes you to the "post new comment" spot anyway.)
Neat.
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media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmer8oF8My1qafrh6.jpg
2579309 Hahaha, exactly my reference.
This would be a good UI for another feature.
'bug'.
I click the 'bug' icon next to the bookmark, and then out pops a 'bug'.
This looks like a bookmark with a little edit-box.
I can then type into the box what the issue is with the paragraph.
The hashing would also make them go away if the paragraph is edited.
Is there a way to have a page like a bookshelf which shows which chapters have bookmarks? I use several devices and I tend to lose opened chapters I haven't completely read yet.
o-oh my god
this is brilliant
All hail bookmarks! This is a great idea.
This idea has been 100% approved by Pinkie Pie.
Cool feature, though not very useful for me. I do just about ALL my reading on my tablet, and it automatically brings me exactly to where I left off.
I can close Chrome on my tab, and it still brings be back when I reopen, I can even power down my tab overnight, forget about my tab for a week, then come back, and it still remembers for me.
Still, this new feature you have given us is pretty slick. Thank you for that.
Excellent.
This is great! Though i wish Fimfiction was easy to access on a phone it takes time and seems buggy ah well it works sometimes and thats all that matters
Awesome
Holy crap, I actually did not know that bookmarks actually worked; I had just assumed they were a function that had been implemented but found flawed and never removed.
Sweet
I know this is not really related to this update, but...
i.imgur.com/tRd5TJW.png
This started happening today. What else do you want me to whitelist? D:
Yeah, I know I can just hide the message, but you may wanna look into your adblock checker.
2580067 browser?
What story did you take that paragraph from?
2580542
Regular Firefox, most recent version.
257892
Um... I actually do read it all in one sitting...
Please don't hate me...
Cool.
Great...so when exactly are we recovering a basic bit of lost functionality from the old favorites list by getting options to set profile based defaults? I'm sick and tired of having to manually change the sorting structure to 'last updated' before being able to see what was recently updated. When are we going to get an option that restores the old automatic hiding of stories that have all chapters marked as read?
Restoration of lost functions should take a priority over shiny new toys. You replaced the rusted lug nuts without changing the flat tire.
2579992 To be fair, that was true for quite some time. It was only fixed in... I think it was the Bookshelf update?
2581630 I don't know about the sorting thing, but:
When you go to the library tab at the top, click the highlighted "xx unread chapters" link instead of the name of the bookshelf. Ta-da!
Hey, knighty; is the "report comment" feature coming back anytime soon? This is in no way related to the post directly previous to this one. Okay, maybe a little.
I'm not sure what's going on, but the site isn't displaying properly on my mobile phone (using Opera Mini 7.1.32052 here.)
Whenever I try reading a story chapter or a blog post, the entire contents of the author's profile page are tacked on to the beginning of the displayed page! This means I'm forced to scroll through a huge stack of irrelevant content until I finally reach the chapter/blog post in question, usually more than halfway down the page. This is making it very annoying to read the site.
For example, trying to read this particular blog post on my phone, I first get... knighty's infobox in the corner over there... a giant, giant list of blog posts (with the one named "RCL Turns 1" quoted in its humongous entirety)... and only then the actual Bookmarks blog post begins, over three-fourths down the page.
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You could also store the number of times the hash was seen before. That would be enough to make it unique. The original paragraph would be (hash, 0), the first time it repeats would be (hash, 1), the second time it repeats would be (hash, 2), and so on.