Some Recent Tweaks (and Post Faving!)

Hey folks. I’ve been plugging away behind the scenes on some new features and while some of them aren’t ready to go yet, others are. I don’t know if Sunday evening is the best time to do this, but here’s what’s new on the site:

1. Faving posts. For the past several months, KDO members have been able to fave comments in threads and it’s been working well. The feature allows people to applaud/reward good comments, keep track of comments that they particularly like, and, in aggregate, participate in showing the community as a whole which comments are especially popular or meaningful.

Now I’ve extended that capability to posts; members will find a fave button attached to every post on the site. The number of faves a post has will appear next to the fave button. I went around and around on whether to display fave counts or to figure out some alternative way to indicate the popularity of a post, but I settled on just displaying them because it’s easy and everyone understands that if number is big, post is more popular/beloved. (I also went back and forth a jillion times about whether to do faves with stars, faves with hearts, or likes with hearts. Faves with stars felt right because it’s old school. You can tell me I’m wrong in the comments.)

Like I said when I launched the comment faves, there isn’t a limit to the number of posts you can fave, but in the spirit of kottke.org’s community guidelines, try to be thoughtful and community-minded about faves. At their best, faves are a useful communal signal for others looking for the most interesting posts.

Still to do: I’m working on making it so you can see a list of posts you’ve faved and a list of the most-faved posts on the site. And there are other things that can be done with the faves…it’ll take some time to figure out what those are.

Again, this feature is only for members. A few people have been testing this with me for a few months and I’m excited to open it up to members.

2. The main content area is now wider on non-mobile browsers. When I launched the most recent design in March 2024, I said I wanted the site to feel like a contemporary version of an old school blog, which meant a more compact design. For many posts, this works well but the more visual posts — with embedded art, photos, illustrations, and videos — didn’t look as good as they could have. Hopefully the wider content area gives them more room to breathe.

3. Along with that, I made some tweaks to the sidebar: decreased the menu font sizes, decreased the width, and tweaked the design of the logged-in user view (which I’m still not entirely happy with, but we’re gonna go with it and see).

4. For non-mobile browsers, clicking play on embedded videos in posts will now open up the video in a lightboxed player the width of the browser window. If that doesn’t make sense, just give it a try with one of the internet’s favorite videos, Tom Holland lip-syncing to Umbrella:

I’ve had this feature enabled for myself for a few months and I love it — it’s a much better viewing experience than in KDO’s narrow column or on YouTube or Vimeo. And if you do want to click through and watch it on the original site, it’s only one extra click. I’ve also been making sure I put a link to the video in the text of the post so that it’s easy to get to that way. (I suspect some of you are going to hate this feature because it overrides the expected behavior of the video click. But I genuinely believe it’s better for watching videos! Like, this isn’t some weird tactic to keep people on the site — please, go to YouTube if you want, delete your KDO bookmark, shut your computer down, throw your phone in the ocean, walk into the forest, you’re the internet now, you’re free! In other words, give the lightboxed videos a chance?)

(Reminder: clicking on images in non-Quick Link posts will open them in a lightbox as well. I love this feature too.)

Ok, I think that’s all for now. As always, let me know in the comments below (or via email) if you have any questions, feedback, or concerns.

Tags: kottke.org

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