Geek Speak — HabitableZone

Geek Speak » in reply to 2 cents for Robert

My two cents' worth
Robert — (archived)

I think the site loads too slowly too. Part of the problem is debugging stuff that I haven't taken out, but part of is intrinsic to the current design.

I'm trying out a new approach to making the pages load faster, a single-page interface to the site called "The Nexus". What's uploaded is a rough prototype--beware.

A lot of the load time of the current design is stuff that's common to all boards: The HTML (structurally) and a pile of script. Currently that stuff has to be reloaded when you go to another board. But the Nexus design has the structural HTML and the script on a single page. When you switch to a new board, or to the Album or Guide, it loads a new header, the style sheet that controls the navigation button color scheme, and the table of contents. Everything else stays the same. The design isn't optimized yet, but to me it seems noticeably faster already.

The other thing about the Nexus is that its compact mode is really compact. When you click the Compact button in the upper-left corner, the header and the nav buttons disappear. What's left is a narrow toolbar at the top of the window with a dropdown selector to move between boards and features. When you're viewing a board, there's also a narrow toolbar at the bottom with the TOC buttons. Compact mode is essentially the graphic-less mode Rob's asking for.

I'd appreciate it if y'all would check it out and give me your feedback. What you see now is rough and flaky, but I think there's enough there to get some idea of whether this direction is going to be an improvement.

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