YC News Tracker: A better way to read comments | Hacker News Reader

YC News Tracker: A better way to read comments

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12 pointswaleedka19 comments

Unrelated but relevant: YC Application Word Count

http://www.commonplacelog.com/ycbookmarklet.html

Thanks! This will help keep track of the hundreds of new comments when pg posts a new essay.

It would be nice to have something that lists the monitored threads. For instance, if I wanted to track the progress of this thread, it would be a lot easier to have a list from YC Tracker bookmarklet than to remember and search for the title "YC News Tracker blah blah."

That would be really nice. I'm storing the thread IDs in cookies, so I have a list of them. But I'm not storing the thread titles. If I do, the cookie might get big if you track a lot of threads. And, since cookies are sent to the server on every request, a big cookie could affect performance (although it's probably not noticeable at all on broadband). I'll have to think more about it. And, maybe check if I can have the cookies be set to client-only. If that's doable, it'll solve the problem.

What you really need is a greasemonkey plugin :)

I just pushed all the javascript into a .user.js file and put in the correct header, and got a working greasemonkey plugin: http://akkartik.name/newsyc-comment-tracker.user.js

Wow!

Currently autoadds every comment thread you ever visit. I'll add support for seeing monitored threads now, and maybe deleting some threads if others want that.

It's still Waleed's baby, though.

Super. Thanks akkartik. Can't wait to see the monitored threads list, that would be awesome.

Done.

http://akkartik.name/newsyc-comment-tracker2.user.js

One little feature request. Can you list the threads in descending order by time of visit? This way, the ones I visit last show at the top. I think it can be done if you attach the time-stamp to the cookie, and then order by it.

Yeah, let me look into it.

New version with delete by cookie. http://akkartik.name/newsyc-comment-tracker3.user.js

Bugfix: delete should work properly now.

Awesome. I just updated the blog post to mention your plugin and link to the latest script.

Great. Thanks for your kind words.

Update about sorting the links by access time: my sorting-fu on javascript isn't that great, and it doesn't seem as easy as in perl/python/ruby.

A second complication: I currently have code in there to watch out for duplicate cookies in case somebody upgraded to the script after using your bookmarklet for a while. I'll pull that code out in a few days. That should make the sorting code simpler.

Wow, very nice. Althogh my 'break time' link is gone :(. But, still, I really like it. Thanks a bunch.

It's worth mentioning here that akkartik has built a really cool tool that shows the changes on any web page since the last time you visited it. And, it works automatically because it's a plugin, not a bookmarklet. Check it out:

http://hystry.com/

Another nice feature would be to have the comment notification automatically show on monitored threads without having to re-click the YC Tracker toolbar link.

A simple greasemonkey plugin: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65382

Unfortunately, that's not possible with a bookmarklet because it doesn't execute unless you click it.

Thanks Waleed - nice work!

It was fun to write. Ideas for improvement are welcome. As well as bug reports.

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