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Comment by subsection1h | Hacker News Reader

Is your blog powered by Meteor? I ask because your blog has some major issues:

First, when I load http://differential.io/blog and click a link for an old article, the content of the "Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails" article is displayed instead of the content of the article I wanted to read. This happens for every article.

Second, when I load http://differential.io/blog, scroll down to an old article, click the article's link, and then click my Back button, I'm directed to the top of http://differential.io/blog, not to the middle of the page where I left off. Very annoying.

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I still think blogs shouldn't require javascript. I certainly can't read the article in w3m. And to read it in Firefox I'd have to enable javascript for the domain -- which I occasionally do -- but why should I have to do that to read a bit of text?

I can't read an offline version (reasonably) via wget/curl. I find it doubly ironic considering that the blog actually has a nice clean design -- seemingly focused on content. So why not publish it as content?

As a side note, the text of the article (copy pasted) takes up 7.2k. The main javascript file 591K.

Sorry if this comes off as a bit random anti-javsscript rant, but just because we now have a few apps that benefit from client side logic, doesn't mean that most content on the web does. Surely we can use meteor or whatever to implement (one of) the interfaces to our cms/blog -- and still publish regular content as html+css (maybe with an RSS feed that allows for easy syndication)?

I visited Meteor's blog just now at http://www.meteor.com/blog to see if it would break my Back button the way that your blog did. Indeed, it did. Clicking my Back button at a Meteor-powered site seems to always direct me to the top of the previous page, not to the location on the previous page where I left off. As I wrote in the parent comment, this issue is very annoying.

Is this a problem that the Meteor developers are working to resolve?

I don't use Meteor, but If I recall correctly, when we added client-side composition to our blog [1], I had to capture the scroll position when I pushed a new entry into the history stack. When that entry is popped back off, I manually move the scroll position since the browser doesn't know to do that itself.

I think it more or less works. If you scroll down and click one of the older entries and then press back, it should remember where you were in the bigger page.

Kind of a pain in the rear, frankly. It was sort of fun doing the client-side composition, and I like the immediacy of it, but I'm left a little apprehensive.

[1] http://www.techempower.com/blog/

Hah, I went to the website and it just sat there refreshing itself. After me manually refreshing it a few times it eventually loaded. Can't say I would bother touching Meteor.

Thanks for identifying those issues — bugs we'll fix.

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