Comments on: Userscripts.org … Opensource!

By: Vintage Tractors for Sale

Vintage Tractors for Sale — Thu, 07 May 2009 06:39:07 +0000

Did you design this template?

By: Lior

Lior — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 03:04:00 +0000

A quick question: you write "We got a bit excited and made the common mistake of using Ajax in a few places where it simply doesn’t belong. A perfect example of this was the login system."
May I ask why was it a mistake? What did you find wrong in using AJAX? Was it hard to maintain? Was it incompatible? Did it alienate users? I want to understand this design decision, and it escapes me…
Thanks.

By: Johan Sundström

Johan Sundström — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 03:04:00 +0000

Congratulations on getting to the public release stage!

Lior: Perhaps most pressingly, the login widget would not interact well with Firefox’s password manager, forcing all to use it manually (or with custom crafted user scripts…), even if they would have preferred using their browser’s aids there.

By: Britt

Britt — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 03:04:00 +0000

Loir,

AJAX, like anything has places where it makes sense and areas where it doesn’t. There have been several articles about the caveats of the overuse of AJAX (http://aranea.zuavra.net/index.php/30/ for example).

In userscripts specifically, several areas were broken:
* As Johan mentioned, the login system broke browser’s password managers.
* Searching for a script is one of the primary way’s to find what you need, and the "Live Search" on the front of the page provided a cramped space for much needed information about your results.
* While not AJAX specifically, we tended to overuse javascript effects to show/hide elements within pages when there were often more simple ways to get the info to the users.

So will we still be using AJAX for easily updating of content within the site? Yes. It’s just important to make sure you have a glove that fits.

By: Paul Irish

Paul Irish — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 03:04:00 +0000

This is great news! thank you!

By: Frederick

Frederick — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 03:04:00 +0000

Here’s a design prototype I’m kind of working on. Take a look and tell me what you think. http://filer.brnm.se/i/userscripts.002.png

By: Johan Sundström

Johan Sundström — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 03:04:00 +0000

While my opinion is just that of an innocent bystander, I’m strongly in favour of it, Frederick. A clean and not very busy look. It’s probably worth doing a few of the more complicated views with data in them before it’s possible to really deem whether it would work better than the present layout, though.

By: Britt

Britt — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 03:04:00 +0000

Frederick, I like the style very much, especially the logo. As soon as you posted that I went to the wiki to create a page for various prototypes and contributions.

If we come up with a variety of styles and ideas, we can have community discussion on how best to implement the new design.

My first comment would be on removing some of the unused space at the top, as to not hide page content.

Could you prototype how you’d envision content below the header, for example a script’s page? Thanks for your already great contribution!

By: Frederick

Frederick — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 03:04:00 +0000

Thanks for your opinion guys, that positive and constructive feedback is encouraging. I’ll see how I can develop this further, and I’ll continue coming here and on the wiki.

By: tractor

tractor — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 03:04:00 +0000

A wild and random idea:

* throw away the whole code base
* setup a trac [http://trac.edgewall.org/] with user registration and subversion integration
* write a site from scratch for categorization, scripts voting and such things

The basic idea is that every registered user can commit to the SVN repo (in its own directory, just like CPAN) and has write access to the wiki.

Every user can read the whole thing and report bugs and improvements.

Benefits:
* Use a mature and stable product for "commodity" things like storing code (subversion), writing a simple page for each script (trac embedded wiki) report bugs (trac issue tracker)
* Focus on adding new value on top of that like tagging scripts, writing a good search engine (in a semantic way) for the scripts, providing alerts and RSS feeds, etc.

my 2c