A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
God, that is just gold. Randall really has a gift -- he speaks to our imaginations so much that he can count on geeks around the world to participate in conversation with whatever he dreams up. Here's to hoping that we will get to see many more years of his creativity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ringworld_Engineers
> ... many fans had identified numerous engineering problems in the Ringworld as described in the novel. A major problem being that the Ringworld, being a rigid structure, was not actually in orbit around the star it encircled and would eventually drift, resulting in the entire structure colliding with its sun and disintegrating.
Yep; could not agree more. One solution to this problem could be adding some pagination information to the window.location while you scroll, like the list item you're currently looking, but that creates a new problem: if you go Back that'll just bring you to the previous list item, instead of the previous webpage; not very predictable IMO.
Do you happen to know then why popular sites like Facebook aren't using this approach to preserve infinite list position when going back? There probably is some big disadvantage i'm not seeing.
For another thing, it's a bit more complicated to implement (you need to have a valid URL for every little piece of every page on your site) for not a lot of benefit that most people would notice. In fact, if you don't do them really well, it might confuse people when their bookmarks don't take them to the start of the page. They're sort of the awkward middle child between permalinks to an index and permalinks to posts, and even if they were there people wouldn't want them as often as the other two. This would probably put it in the "Maybe get to this later" pile.
Not to say that I don't agree with your conclusions about infinite scroll -- I'd much prefer sensible pagination.
I'd like to point out, however, that FB already does some kind of similar trick with the URL hash when browsing photos: if you open someone's photo, it'll open in a modal dialog where you can navigate to other photos and this in-page navigation _will_ change the URL hash. If you go to that modified URL directly (or refresh the page) FB will show a different page (inside the person's "album") with that photo.
I'd reason that, for FB, a photo is more of a tangible thing than an item in your infinite stream, thus it deserves separate URLs when browsing the them.
Also, yes, i agree in that it could be perceived as a strange behaviour, but to me the current behaviour is also quite strange: if i'm scrolling down the FB stream, triggering a couple of stream sudden enlargements, then go somewhere else on that tab, and then go back to the FB stream, the browser will remember my last scroll position on that page and will try to scroll down to where i was, unfortunately that position does not exists when the page is loaded so it ends up scrolling to a seemingly random point in the middle of the stream (actually it's the bottom of the stream when the page loads, but that triggers a stream-append and then it's not the bottom anymore), not where i was before nor at the start of it (at least this happens in Firefox).
Lately it seems almost everyone of his articles has been really well thought out and insightful.
Does anyone know if this is what he does fulltime? I assume so seeing as how he said he spent a solid month and a half on the money chart.
Where did all this start?
I was going through old math/sketching graph paper notebooks and didn't want to lose some of the work in them, so I started scanning pages. I took the more comic-y ones and put them up on a server I was testing out, and got a bunch of readers when BoingBoing linked to me. I started drawing more seriously, gained a lot more readers, started selling t-shirts on the site, and am currently shipping t-shirts and drawing this comic full-time. It's immensely fun and I really appreciate y'all's support.
xkcd has sticky content, too.