Alex Pooley's Blog

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On the left of my blog you can now find a ScribbleHere widget. With the widget you can see live information about my chat page called “The Developers”, and if you click on the title of the chat page (The Developers) you will be taken to the chat page to view and/or participate in the conversation.

Unfortunately the widget was made manually as an experiment, but I like the direction so I’m going to automate the widget creation. Do you have any widget suggestions? Things you would like to use? I’ll be developing widgets shortly so, please leave a comment with your suggestion/idea!

The ScribbleHere chat interface has been redesigned so that it’s more simple, obvious, and less taxing on the back end.

My biggest problem with the previous design was that I was using a context menu. Context menu’s are common place on the desktop, but very uncommon on web sites. This made a lot of important functionality hidden behind an unintuitive interface.

As for the back end - the previous interface pulled in all posts from chat pages that the user owned, or was a member of. The problem with this is that every request is then a very specific request for data tailored for each user, so no two users make the same query. With the new interface, queries are made on a per page basis, so there is only a single request actually processed for each user on the page. The other users will receive a cached copy. By caching the performance improves by greater than a magnitude.

The down side of the change is that you can’t tell if there is activity on other chat pages unless you have them open. However, you can easily navigate to any of your page and leave multiple chats open if you like.

Last thing of note, I added a bunch of subscription buttons to the chat interface so you can now passively monitor your chats by subscribing to them in your feed reader.