Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Pagination can be so 1990's

Coldfusion Bloggers is a real cool site aggregator, but I have to confess, even since Ray switched over to jQuery from the heavy native CF stuff, the pagination is really annoying.

Why do we need to page 10 records at a time? why not 50 or 100?

There was a time when computers where bloody slow and pagination helped reduce system load, but it's 2008 and as Google proved, things have improved and we can do things differently.

Personally I like the planet style blog aggregators, but I prefer the CFBloggers style as I get some nice stats on whether or not people are reading my blog. Currently, the readership for my blog bobs between 100-500 hits a day.

It's a great feeling when I go to a conference or even quite randomly meet people and I get some nice feedback that they read my blog....

So Ray, what do ya think about bumping up the pagination size?

Update: Ray has tweaked cfbloggers, the following url will set an cookie which sets it up for 100 rows per page, tho 50 is probably enough

7 comments:

Raymond Camden said...

I think you have to consider more then just speed. Yes, it would be easy to put 100 items on the screen. But to me, that would be a bit overwhelming to the reader. If they glance away for a bit and come back, they could more easily forget how far they had scanned. I just think it would be overwhelming.

Anonymous said...

I've also seen something - maybe jQuery as well that simply uses Ajax to pull the next XX records and stick them on the bottom - think DZone does this. So there is just a continuous scroll...

Zac Spitzer said...

@jim I like the continuous scroll idea, a bit like google reader then as well

@ray having a cookie and marking news posts would help & aren't most screens wide but shallow these days, there are only so many posts visible on one page

Raymond Camden said...

Bah, I love DZone, but don't like the scroll. I think it's the OCD part of me that is bothered by the fact that you never get to the bottom.

Ok, since you guys bitched and moaned so much (kidding!), I added the ability to specify a page size. Just go to CFB and add pageSize=1-100 to the URL. A cookie will be stored so you don't need to update your bookmarks.

Zac Spitzer said...

as in http://www.coldfusionbloggers.org/index.cfm?pageSize=1-100

alas it didn't work?

Zac Spitzer said...

ok, I saw your post, I'll footnote mine

Raymond Camden said...

Nope, I meant a # from 1 to a 100. Not literally 1-100. ;)