Conversation

Some readers on refactorcamp.org mastodon flagged an interesting but difficult UI problem with my blogchains format. They’d like to be able to follow along like Netflix, picking up where they last left off. If they’ve only read 7/10 parts, part 8 should be their view.
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Technically this would take an advanced series plugin that maintains personalized reader queue state as a cookie perhaps (not hard... n blockchains = n integers, 1 for each) and display a home page with all the “next episodes” highlighted, BUT...
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This fundamentally alters the blog experience from monotemporality to multitemporal. If RSS was like single-channel appointment tv (“new episodes of ribbonfarm drop on thursdays around 5pm” was my standard for years) to something like streaming TV.
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I would *love* it if blogchain writing got popular enough that it would be worthwhile for someone to reinvent RSS along these lines. In stead of being subscribed yo a bunch of channels on a push clock, you’re subscribed to a bunch of shows (blogchains) on a pull clock.
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This is unfortunately a 2-sided market problem with chicken-egg dynamics. I could probably fund someone to write a wordpress plugin to do the destination server side (you see custom page when you land on a blog) but this is more naturally a client side problem.
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Done server side, cookie-based management is janky (expiration timing and cross-device persistence mess) and more stable stateful user accounts for all readers is a nightmare for both publishers and readers (and both are GDPR nightmares; I don’t want to manage users)
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Hmm. Are you still doing personal consulting, or is that edged out by full-time work? I'd be happy to trade an hour or two, I think this should be pretty easy to do just client-side (keep views in localstorage and add a button at the top saying "continue from episode 8" maybe)
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I am, but very limited bandwidth for the moment, and I find barter generally works poorly for me. If pure client side is the answer, I’d rather pay someone to do it. Probably the people who wrote the series plugin I use is the right person since they can maintain.