

Show HN: An animated history of Reddit - kahoon
http://redditsnapshots.com/play/2012/7/12/0

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JumpCrisscross
I'm having a spot of trouble following items through the "shuffle".

Perhaps one could divide the horizontal space such that each story gets it own
invisible vertical band. A translucent coloured dot exists where the band
intersects the story's present position. The dot traces a light line behind it
from left to right. When the story falls off the page its band is collapsed.
You know how long a story stays on the page so running out of space isn't a
problem.

More simply, one could leave a single-period trail, with one terminus where
the story was and the other where it is, persisting for only a moment after
each shuffle.

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kahoon
Thank you very much for your thoughtful suggestion! I'm definitely looking for
ideas on how to make the animation easier to follow.

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kahoon
For anyone curious, I built it using TypeScript, d3.js, mongoDB, and node.js.
I'm planning to open source it after I've made some facelifts on the codebase
:)

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cool_guy
Why do you need d3.js for this ?

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kahoon
The complexity of the project does not make it absolutely vital (the animation
could be done in plain jQuery with a little more hassle), but it was fun and I
wanted to try it :)

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kn0thing
Yarg. I wish this better-represented the fact that reddit is a platform for
communities (subreddits) but so it goes. Long before subreddits, here's what
reddit looked like in the first months after Steve and I launched it:
<http://reddit.blogspot.com/2006/12/time-machine.html>

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kodablah
How do you work around their suggested API limits of one request every 2
seconds and one request per-page every 30 seconds?

Edit: I see this is a history. Though the question still stands for many
reddit clients. I want to use the API, but find the terms too limiting for
what I want to do.

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kahoon
Can't you use your own server to get the data you want from the Reddit API
only once, and then serve this as many times as you want (since the server is
yours)?

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kodablah
But what if I want comments from 1200 threads? It will take me 40 minutes at
one request every two seconds. I understand why reddit (and other API's) do
the limit, I just want to find a way to experiment w/ new commenting UI's and
still withstand the HN/reddit effect when showing it off.

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cnlwsu
needs to be a pause, some things disappear before I can even read the heading.

~~~
kahoon
Yeah, now the only way to pause is pressing the < > buttons at the top. I'm
planning to make the navigation controls always visible, so you will be able
to pause even if you've scrolled down.

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asax
Impressive! Well done.

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RobertHoudin
This only goes back one year. I would hardly call that a "history" of Reddit.

