joshd

That sounds like slavery.

That video is painful to watch.

I prefer to send the page to the index before loading dynamic content. Imagine two scenarios:

I send a link to a friend saying "check out the kittens": <example.com/product/pr0n#/product/kittens> My friend ends up on a completely different page and there is no explaination as to why the page is wrong. Secondly, the URL leaked information about my browsing history. Finally, Google page rank goes to /produces/pr0n rather than the cute kittens.

If the URL is <example.com/#/product/kittens> then my friend sees the homepage rather than the correct product page. At least they'll know they're on the right site and can easily search for the correct page manually. Google page rank goes to the homepage rather than some arbitrary page.

Too much time spent around Django :P

I've implemented this before. The site was standard MVC, built in CodeIgniter. I then built a middleware layer that would either decorate the content with a layout template to generate the HTML version or create a JSON structure with linked elements (CSS and JS files) and page title.

The JavaScript would parses the incoming JSON and attach listeners to all the elements. It had to do a few tricky things like tracking JS and CSS files and provide alternatives to dom:loaded so scripts could be rerun on dynamically loading content. Really Simple History was then used to track the state.

I built and tested the functionality as a plain HTML site first then builf the dynamic loader afterward, which was relatively easy to implement. Some of the trickiest parts were gettingand the DOM to update in a timely fashion and to get the interface to "feel" right (when do you clear the old page, when do you scroll user back to top of page, etc.).

Like emilis said, there are still a few small cases where the implemetation breaks down, mainly when sending or publishing links. I ended up enforcing clean links: if you hit a HTML page when you had JavaScript enabled it would take you to the homepage and reload your desired page from there. This was mainly because not doing so would make the copy-paste problems worst. E.g. If you expecting to see "bar" but had no JavaScript then example.com/foo#bar (showing foo rather than bar) would be more confusing seeing the homepage at example.com/#bar. The redirect logic was the first thing encountered on the page so was pretty quick. E.g. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thebeatles...

I wouldn't recommend implementing this unless you absolutely had to. For me the requirement for a streaming music player was a "must-have" feature. Even the quickest page load would still lead to skipping music.

I'd love to see an example of how people are redefining their schema with NoSQL databases (especially with document based databases like CouchDB). A common example you hear is "Your blog document can contain an array of comment nodes". Which is all great in theory but obviously won't scale.

If Digg are using Cassandra as a big key-value store then how do they look up comments for posts? If they're storing one entry per comment with an index on post ID then it's not really key based any more.

We hear a lot of case studies about performance increases, but I never seem to see any practical details on how the databases should be used correctly.

I signed up for your site a while ago so I'd like to share my thoughts.

Design wise the site is a bit dull, but passable. The text is unbelievably hard to read (on Windows/Firefox, default font size). I'm guessing you use Mac or Linux, otherwise you would never have launched with that font.

I originally signed up because the site had the promise of a good recommendation engine. That's something that others have promised (Jaanix, reddit) but no one has really delivered on. If you have got something that you think is unique then tell people about it. I even visited the about page on my first session, trying to find what made your page different. I still don't know.

The biggest problem was with the content. When I first visited most links on the front page seemed to be on machine learning/AI. I guess that probably is because of the interests of the initial users, but I don't need a whole page of links on the same topic. If possible a mix of article types would be good; I found most links were just Wikipedia articles.

Finally, I'm not sure how I feel about the rating system. Other sites have two ratings for a reason. It is much harder to choose between 10 options and breaks up the flow.