
Show HN: An infinite scrolling feed cache to keep things nice when users return - nate
https://m.signalvnoise.com/snapback-cache-what-we-use-to-make-our-infinite-scrolling-feeds-at-highrise-awesome-a789128e807a#.cxhau48xs
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mchahn
> Almost all of them suffer from the same problem. If you click on something
> in the feed that brings you to a new page, when you hit the back button or
> try to return to that original feed, your place is lost.

Does everyone else see this also? I don't remember the last time it happened
to me.

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gukov
The facebook feed is unusable because of this. Not only you lose your place,
but the whole feed is completely different.

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theseatoms
This is why I usually Ctrl + click to open link in new tab when scrolling
through an infinite scroll.

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mchahn
I just realized that I do this by habit so maybe that's why I never see the
problem. I'd just as well see all clicks go to new tabs. It's just as easy to
hit ctrl-W as it is to hit backspace.

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christianmann
For that reason, I'd prefer to see /no/ clicks go to new tabs by default, and
let the user decide.

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theseatoms
This must be a configurable setting within most browsers...

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kingkool68
I just use real URLs that resolve when you navigate back to them...
[https://www.zadieheimlich.com](https://www.zadieheimlich.com) (terrible use
case as clicking a heading takes you to the same thing you see currently on
the homepage but you get the idea.)

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nate
I pondered doing something like that, however there's a performance impact
with that version right? So if I want to let a user scroll for 5 pages (30
records each), click on something, and then go back to a URL that "resolves".
That url is going to have to render all 5 pages of stuff to get the look
right. That might not be that big of a deal for a bunch of apps, but for us
had a cost I didn't want to pay. So keeping it all cached on the client and
just picking up scrolling where the user had left off seemed like a good
solution right now.

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justinph
If you had a publicly visible site that you wanted to be crawled, then having
a real url would be pretty important.

But for something like Highrise, where it's dark to google and crawlers, your
solution makes sense.

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PhasmaFelis
I've never figured out what the problem was that infinite-scroll was supposed
to fix. Unfucking the Back button is nice, but it feels kind of like expecting
praise because you've decided to stop beating your wife.

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michaeldwan
Paging is an implementation detail that's forced on users, like flipping the
cassette to side B. It's really great for reading a stream of content without
having to think about previous or next, especially when referencing items that
would otherwise be on a previous page. DuckDuckGo is a good example.

That said, it's also abused a lot...

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cyphar
Anyone who has encountered a book is familiar with the concept of pages. I
doubt that people would prefer their books printed on a single strip of paper.
Why do the same for websites. Not to mention that bookmarks are broken in both
scenarios (single sheet books and infinite scrolling webpages).

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bryanrasmussen
hey, this article references JQuery - these people dared to solve a problem
without using React and Redux and something released last week!

