Watching life backwards

[lovingboth]

One of the annoyances of LJ is that it is difficult to read it 'forwards'.

Like most people, I start by looking at

http://www.livejournal.com/users/lovingboth/friends

(of course, a) you look at yourLJname/friends and b) there's almost always a friends group filter too...)

then

http://www.livejournal.com/users/lovingboth/friends?skip=15

(your number may vary...)

and so on, back in time.

So, to take an example from today's reading, you see the aftermath of a breakup before knowing that a breakup has happened.

Reading news in this way can be interesting - I once looked through a pile of year-old Guardians and hindsight meant it was both possible and fascinating to spot the small beginnings of what became big stories.

But normally I prefer to live life forwards.

And as I say, that's currently difficult with LJ. You can make a guess about the right value for ?skip= and iterate to the right figure, then start reading 'next 15 entries' until you hit 'now'.

But if someone on your friendslist posts between loading page n, reading it and loading the next page n-1, you will miss an entry! The bottom entry on page n-1 will become the top entry on page n and you'll never know (without looking at page n again).

Let's say it again: LJ needs an offline reader (OLR). You'd download all the entries you hadn't read, then the OLR can present them to you in any order you desire.

Comments

[elfgeek.livejournal.com]

Just an idea if this kind of thing annoys you: I usually go to my friends list and open as many previous tabs as I have to until I'm back where I left off the night before. This only works if I have enough time of course.

Either that...

[kingginger.livejournal.com]

... or a cookie / function that takes you forward in time from the time you last read your friends page.

Useful for intermittent friends page checking (like me).

But not so useful for an F5 junkie :-)

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

Actually, i go back until I find a familiar entry. Since it isn't always fast, I will possibly have read some later posts.

Unless there are lots of posts, I probably have checked for any
slippage.

I don't use filters, and I have fifty posts per page.

I would like, however, a way of marking posts as read. Would that be hard to create? I've no idea.

[vampwillow]

Usually I read backwards but if something is clearly based on previous events I haven't seen then open up their LJ alongside.

The other method is to make a post on your own LJ before you turn off for the night to give yourself a timestamp, then go back x pages and individually forward to you hit that time.

Probably depends on how many people you have on your flist really...

[mattp.livejournal.com]

The idea I had last year some time (http://www.livejournal.com/users/matthewp/99055.html) - you even commented on it - could perhaps be extended to allow for this functionality.

I vaguely recall that at the time my news-subsystem (leafnode) did not support local groups, so I gave up. Having just looked again, this is now no longer the case. I'll give it some more thought.

[lovingboth]

syncitems would appear - from looking at the docs rather than the source - to be potentially very useful once the ability to ask about comments is added. If you could say "give me a list of all the posts and comments visible to me added to journalname since time t", you'd be halfway there.

While I'm talking to a developer :) my other major annoyance with LJ is the way that the 'previous entry' / 'next entry' navigation is almost useless for any journal that's not completely readable by you.

If you try to use it and the relevant message is not readable by you (eg it's private or you're not in the relevant friends group) then you get a 'you are not authorised to read this' message, without even the option to go to the message after that.

A far better behaviour would be to show the previous / next message that you can read. It can't be difficult: it's what happens if you look at www.livejournal.com/users/username ...

This is a privacy issue. I may not want you to know that there are messages on my LJ that you can't read! (There's a similar issue with the calendar too.)

[lproven.livejournal.com]

You are *so* right!

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

An OLR would be great. You wouldn't need to invent a new protocol - you could use NNTP or IMAP or suchlike.

LJ also needs to dump skip=15 in favour of start=1102262910 or similar, specifying a start time, such that the starting point it represents is fixed rather than changing as new posts are added. That would solve the problem you present - and give you a way to say "give me all posts from this time onwards" facilitating the cookie thing mentioned above and similar possibilities.