Take Control of Your Vox Recent Activity

Feb 4, 2008 at 10:22 AM
12 comments

Ever since Papi Chulo (formerly Pants Party) first pointed it out to me, I've been both happy and frustrated with the Vox Recent Activity page. On one hand, it does provide an "easy" way to keep track of follow-up comments and favorites on posts you or someone in your neighborhood. On the other hand, it can bulky with 30+ posts on the page, each with its own set of comments. Scrolling down to older posts can put a serious case of carpal tunnel on your mouse-wheel finger, and if you have a couple of really popular threads going, you might not even know that one of the older posts has had a follow-up. (I've also heard some people can't even load the page in their browsers, but I'm not sure this will fix that issue.)

I decided to jump on the Greasemonkey bandwagon and write a GM script to help out with this issue. I came up with a solution that, while quick-and-dirty, does a good job of streamlining the Vox Recent Activity page: the script creates links in each post to show/hide the comments, with the default setting of all comments being hidden on initial page load. That means your page that used to look like this:

Recent Activity Page - Normal

now looks like this:

Recent Activity Page - After Script

All you have to do to view the comments for an individual post is click on the [+/-] link, and they'll toggle from hidden to shown. Click it again and they go back to being hidden! Pretty cool, huh?

Example of Expanded Thread

Now your recent activity page is a lot slimmer, easier to navigate, and you can click on just the posts that you want to follow up on to see the most recent activity.

Want to install this script for your own use? First install Greasemonkey, and then get the script here.
(Instructions to install Greasemonkey can be found here.)

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions on how to improve this script, please leave a comment here or send me an email.

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[this is good]

Wow!
Extra terrific, I think this is a lot of help :)

I have a suggestion over here, i think there should be a way in this script to let the user see some of the comments instantly, maybe like when the mouse hovers over the post, a white box shows (like a tooltip) and contains maybe the first 4 or 5 posts and the first line of each one! I think this would spare the pain of clicking on the + and then - to restore :)

Thanks again

[this is good]

Cool. I was a religious user of the Vox Reader (a.k.a. the recent activity page) for a while, until they a). made the VOX homepage a little better for a brief time and b). made the Recent Activity page more annoying to get to.

[this is good]

that's pretty neat.

FWIW, I was one of those peoples who couldn't even get to the Vox home page with my browser but today it's fine for the first time since the Big Switch, so maybe they did adjust something.

Thanks for the suggestion - I'll look at something like this, but it's a whole different order of magnitude from what I've done so far. Since tool tips are limited to something like 88 characters, I'd have to implement some sort of javascript popup system like this one at Wikipedia to handle the preview on a mouse-over.

That's not to say it isn't possible, but it's going to take some looking into - if I can figure out a way to re-purpose some scripts and just add in the proper hooks to get things into a Vox page and tailored for Vox comments, I'll work on this.

That's exactly what I meant.
The one at Wikipedia seems okay, but I want to slip this one over here, i think it's good :-)

[this is good]

Nice one, GreaseMonkey master!
It only took me 5 minutes to find VoxWatch again...and that's with your picture...sheesh!
Thanks for making this place a bit less painful.

Yes, the easier the implementation, the better. The wikipedia one is awfully complex and is much more than we need over at Vox. The one you pointed out is more along the lines of what we would want - but it looks like they require a license for use.

I found this after doing some searching yesterday - it might give us what we need without requiring some licensing...we'll see...I might find another if I keep looking, too.

This one from mininova labs is great! I love the transparency effect, if you could just do some html coding for the text inside that box :)

I would say go for this one, because as you said we don't need much more that on Vox.

This looks great. They're about to change computers on me at work, where this would be most useful, so I'll favorite it to use as soon as they switch me over.

[this is good]

This is something I suggested to VOX ages ago in Feedback. I am grateful that you have come up with something and I am going to try it out. I do not mean to be offensive to you, but if you can do it externally, why can they not do it internally? Thanks again for going to so much trouble.

Ross replied to country_cinderella’s comment:
Feb 7, 2008
Reply

I wouldn't be surprised to see something along these lines (or something built off of this) come into play a few releases down the line from Vox themselves. There are a number of documented cases in the history of these kinds of sites where a need is temporarily filled by user hacks, and then made obsolete when the provider decides to implement it or something similar themselves. If nothing else, bringing this kind of effort to their attention may hasten their desire to integrate something like this into their services.

[this is good]

Nifty idea. :) Thanks for making VoxWatch a better place. :)

Take Control of Your Vox Recent Activity

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