News feed news

Published by Vlasta about 8 hours ago.

For old time members of rw-designer, the changes to their profile pages were probably the most significant. There is much to be said about the new profile pages, but in this blog post, I only want to focus on one part of old user profiles - the news feed.

Decoupling of news feed from profile pages

On the old web site, your profile page was a bit of mess. You were able to customize what other see on it, but it also displayed your news feed (and then there was the comments section, the nightmare of many users).

In the new version, your news subscription feed was moved to a different page (currently called Wall, but that may change), which you can find under the People tab between Inbox and Account.

This new news page also has more details than the old one. While on the old one, you could have seen messages "User X commented cursor set Y" and you had to visit the cursor set page and then find the comment to see what they actually wrote, the new page shows snippets of the comments (or the whole comments if they are not too long).

If you click on a news feed entry, it will take you to the comment directly (if the comment is still visible on the page - there is a limit of 10 comments per page and you have to click to see more). This should save you time as you can only click on news that actually interest you and do not need to visit your cursor set page to find out that the comment was a generic "nice work" or something else you do not need to reply to.

While we are on topic of news feeds, when you look on the second line in the tab section of a page while being on someone's profile, you should see something like:

Home > People > UserXYZ [ Blog | Portfolio | Activity ]

Clicking the Activity link will take you to a page very similar to your news feed page, but it will only contain activity by UserXYZ (or whatever profile you were one). These items would appear in your news feed if you subscribed to that person. Looking on their activity also allows you to quickly find what they are all about - if they mostly write positive comments or not, if they post art or not, how frequently they interact with the web, etc.

Logged-in users are probably much more likely to visit their news feed than their profile page. Your portrait in the upper right corner still links to your profile page. Maybe it would be better if it led to the "Wall" page or maybe there should be an additional link. We'll see. For now, if you want to go to your Wall directly, hover over the People tab and then click on the Wall link.