

YC News Tracker: A better way to read comments - waleedka
http://www.selfdebugging.com/2007/10/09/yc-news-tracker-a-better-way-to-read-comments/

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matth
Unrelated but relevant: YC Application Word Count

<http://www.commonplacelog.com/ycbookmarklet.html>

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yubrew
Thanks! This will help keep track of the hundreds of new comments when pg
posts a new essay.

It would be nice to have something that lists the monitored threads. For
instance, if I wanted to track the progress of this thread, it would be a lot
easier to have a list from YC Tracker bookmarklet than to remember and search
for the title "YC News Tracker blah blah."

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waleedka
That would be really nice. I'm storing the thread IDs in cookies, so I have a
list of them. But I'm not storing the thread titles. If I do, the cookie might
get big if you track a lot of threads. And, since cookies are sent to the
server on every request, a big cookie could affect performance (although it's
probably not noticeable at all on broadband). I'll have to think more about
it. And, maybe check if I can have the cookies be set to client-only. If
that's doable, it'll solve the problem.

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akkartik
What you really need is a greasemonkey plugin :)

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akkartik
I just pushed all the javascript into a .user.js file and put in the correct
header, and got a working greasemonkey plugin: <http://akkartik.name/newsyc-
comment-tracker.user.js>

Wow!

Currently autoadds every comment thread you ever visit. I'll add support for
seeing monitored threads now, and maybe deleting some threads if others want
that.

It's still Waleed's baby, though.

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waleedka
Super. Thanks akkartik. Can't wait to see the monitored threads list, that
would be awesome.

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akkartik
Done.

<http://akkartik.name/newsyc-comment-tracker2.user.js>

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waleedka
One little feature request. Can you list the threads in descending order by
time of visit? This way, the ones I visit last show at the top. I think it can
be done if you attach the time-stamp to the cookie, and then order by it.

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akkartik
Yeah, let me look into it.

New version with delete by cookie. <http://akkartik.name/newsyc-comment-
tracker3.user.js>

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akkartik
Bugfix: delete should work properly now.

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waleedka
Awesome. I just updated the blog post to mention your plugin and link to the
latest script.

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akkartik
Great. Thanks for your kind words.

Update about sorting the links by access time: my sorting-fu on javascript
isn't that great, and it doesn't seem as easy as in perl/python/ruby.

A second complication: I currently have code in there to watch out for
duplicate cookies in case somebody upgraded to the script after using your
bookmarklet for a while. I'll pull that code out in a few days. That should
make the sorting code simpler.

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gibsonf1
Another nice feature would be to have the comment notification automatically
show on monitored threads without having to re-click the YC Tracker toolbar
link.

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akkartik
A simple greasemonkey plugin: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65382>

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gibsonf1
Thanks Waleed - nice work!

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waleedka
It was fun to write. Ideas for improvement are welcome. As well as bug
reports.

