Boing Boing... FOREVER

Fire up your Javascript engines: we've just added infinite scrolling to Boing Boing. Now when you scroll to the bottom of any index page more posts will automatically load in so you can continue your absorption of our nearly 80,000 Wonderful Things. This, combined with some additional changes we've been working on in the background, should also bring you a faster loading, snappier Boing Boing.

Now go out there and scroll to your heart's content.

Creative Commons licensed image courtesy of the awesome Hyperbole and a Half

Software developer and GIF archivist in San Francisco. Follow me on Twitter.

MORE: infinite scrolling

More at Boing Boing

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Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

http://twitter.com/AwesomeRobot AwesomeRobot

Like the little Jackhammer Jill working away to load those stories. Great new feature, or greatest new feature?
Jason Sutor

Welcome to Web 2.1
http://twitter.com/writebastard Ian Wood

I CAN’T GET OUT
moop2000

I’d love to know if this feature affects bandwidth usage for the site after a month or so.
- TheKaz1969
  
  would it be any different? I believe it only loads more once you get to the bottom…
  - dragonfrog
    
    Good question.
    - Some percentage of the people who reach the bottom of the page would have clicked through to see older stories (presumably less bandwidth-consuming now than before, as the page header stuff doesn’t need to reload)
    - Some percentage would have clicked through to read the last story, or stopped, having reached a story they had already seen (presumably more bandwidth-consuming now than before, as the page auto-loads stuff they didn’t actually want to read)
    
    So, depending on how that’s split, bandwidth consumption could go either way.
- Ultan
  
  A couple of days ago the main page took about 30 seconds to load completely on my broadband that tests at about 22Mbps. Now it only takes about 10 seconds.
  
  Awesome!
  - http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney
    
    I’ve been cracking down on load times in the last couple weeks. Glad to see it’s paying off!
Jorpho

Aww. I wanted a Hyperbole and a Half update.
- Brainspore
  
  There’s one at the bottom of the page.
niktemadur

HA HA! Looking for the “Only In India” link, caught the fact before it was posted here!
jarmstrong

Nice! Good hustle.
niktemadur

This being Boing Boing, it would be nice to see Moebius Loop scrolling. You know, scroll all the way down twice to get back to the beginning.
- Guest
  
  keep pressing “J”
http://twitter.com/TaosJohn John Hamilton Farr

OMG it works!
penguinchris

I went looking to see if there is a way to just see all the posts from a single day, as when slashdot implemented a similar scheme there was a lot of grumbling because it broke certain ways to browse the site. There is a way here, if you click archive. Having infinite scrolling works quite well for the way that I read BB though, so I’m happy to see this feature – assuming it doesn’t go by pages internally and possibly omits posts.

However if you do go to the archive, if you scroll to the bottom of a single day’s posts it informs you that you’ve accomplished the incredible and that there are no more posts. I assume this message is meant for those intrepid few who scroll through all 80,000 or so posts on the front page.
- http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney
  
  No, you’re just amazing and we want you to know. *hugs*
- WhyBother
  
  “I assume this message is meant for those intrepid few who scroll through all 80,000 or so posts on the front page.”
  
  No, it’s very useful. Thanks.
  
  I always have mixed feelings about this feature when it’s rolled out on a new site. If I haven’t visited in a few days and I want to jump to the bottom and catch up in order, finding the “bottom” tends to be a trick (a problem on Slashdot). If I’m looking for something in particular that I know should be there – a word in the last article you know you read, a particular friend in a Facebook friend’s list — cntl+F may yield a false negative because the rest of the information is helpfully waiting for you to scroll down and request it.
  
  It sort of reminds me of the first time I realized that common links like “sign in”, “locations”, and “contact us” were all starting to be hidden in CSS menus, even though those were the only things I ever wanted/cntl+F’ed for on a page. I kind of miss the good old days of requesting a page, getting a page, seeing everything at once, and being done with it. But I recognize that I’m in the minority there.
  
  /nostalgia
MattLeidholm

Even better, Boing Boing implemented infinite scrolling without also putting a bunch of important links at the bottom of the page, where we can’t click them. Many sites with infinite scrolling don’t seem to realize this simple fact. Nice work.
- http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
  
  I find it both hilarious and frustrating when that happens, playing the javascript dance trying to click a link that keeps jumping away from you, racing against the rendering speed of your DOM.
shamowfski

Love it.
- niktemadur
  
  Remember the good old days? After going back three pages or so, one reached some weird, unnavigable archive… depository… thingy.
http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza

I think it will reduce it, because the initial load is smaller than the old front page. Most visitors don’t scroll to the bottom.

We will lose a lot of “page 2″ traffic immediately, but hopefully the usability improvement will make up for it in readership.
CourierPica

Whatever you did, thanks for fixing the mobile CSS. The layout on my Galaxy Nexus was totally munged. Now it’s gold.
petiepooo

Before this update, if I took my time getting to the bottom of the page, and new stories were introduced in the mean time, when I clicked Next, I would see some duplicate stories.

That annoyance is still here with infinite scrolling, only it’s less obvious what the cause is.

To test: scroll half way down the page, go to lunch, then scroll down to load more stories. You’ll see duplicates.

I think the way Slashdot does it is, if you scroll to the bottom and there are new stories, it will update the stories at the top first and wait for you to scroll to the bottom again. Of course, I can’t read the new stories unless I scroll back to the top, but that doesn’t bother me as much as seeing duplcates…
- screwt
  
  ha, this happened to me exactly on the “Infinite scroll” post. I read “Infinite scroll”, then 4 articles that I’d just seen, and then “Infinite scroll” again… I thought this was some kind of horrible joke and it would keep looping forever :-)
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

I’m okay with this…
Tyrone Olds

Just so long as important links aren’t lost/unclickable at the bottom of the page. Once I was tableting, got served the mobile version of some site, (the front page, not the content I was trying to view,) and the auto-scroll made it basically impossible to get to the real version.

I suppose I could have tried disabling javascript and hoping their normal button wasn’t scripted, but it really wasn’t worth my time.
David Llopis

It doesn’t seem to play well with the j/k=up/down feature (momma don’t take my j/k away).
- bobrk
  
  Yes, I think when the first load happens, it breaks.
  - http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney
    
    Oooh. Will fix.
    - noah django
      
      came here for this. I used J successfully until Maggie’s smartgrid post, then it sent me back to the masthead. annoying. I thought it was a bug with the ad below her post goofing it up, but then i saw this. macOSX 10.5.8/firefox latest.
    - bobrk
      
      Still seems broken to me.
      - http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney
        
        I’m having some difficulty fixing this. It looks like it works if you’re logged out, but not if you’re logged in. Driving me mad!
Cowicide

Entire site loading much, much faster for me with less javascript processing overhead it seems. Fantastic job, Dean!
terry childers

so completely weird, i wondered aloud about this just this morning. one more reason to lovelovelove boingboing!
Brainspore

This is the blog that never ends,

It just goes on and on my friends,

Some people started reading it without knowing what it was

And they’ll continue reading it forever just because,

This is the blog that never ends,

It just goes on and on my friends,

Some people started reading it without knowing what it was

And they’ll continue reading it forever just because,

This is the blog that never ends,

It just goes on and on my friends,

Some people started reading it without knowing what it was

And they’ll continue reading it forever just because,

This is the blog that never ends,

It just goes on and on my friends,

Some people started reading it without knowing what it was

And they’ll continue reading it forever just because,

This is the blog that never ends,

It just goes on and on my friends,

Some people started reading it without knowing what it was

And they’ll continue reading it forever just because,

This is the blog that never ends,

It just goes on and on my friends,

Some people started reading it without knowing what it was

And they’ll continue reading it forever just because,

This is the blog that never ends,

It just goes on and on my friends,

Some people started reading it without knowing what it was

And they’ll continue reading it forever just because,

This is the blog that never ends,

It just goes on and on my friends,

Some people started reading it without knowing what it was

And they’ll continue reading it forever just because,

This is the blog that never ends,

It just goes on and on my friends,

Some people started reading it without knowing what it was

And they’ll continue reading it forever just because,

This is the blog that never ends,

It just goes on and on my friends,

Some people started reading it without knowing what it was

And they’ll continue reading it forever just because

[TO BE CONTINUED…]
terry childers

are you guys listening to me as i begin my daily ablutions?
Ranting Nerd

Load is much faster, but as mentioned above, it seems to break j/k. :-/
http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

I thought it might be a contest to win a jar in the Alcor vaults.
nothis

Am I the only one who hates infinite-scrolling with a passion?

Basically, it breaks your scroll bar or even if there is no scroll bar, your position on the site. It’s an ugly, abrupt jump. If I just want to scroll down to the “bottom” and then go up to find the first post that’s new, I can’t really do that anymore without risking a load I probably don’t need.

I’d rather activate it manually by clicking “next page”.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  I hate infinite scrolling on Tumblr blogs that are mostly little posts with pictures. It jerks the page around and makes me lose my place. On BB, where the posts are longer and you’re actually reading, it doesn’t seem to have the same effect.
- Ipo
  
  Just block Google APIs and scrolling remains finite.
- http://www.zachstronaut.com/ zachstronaut
  
  I think infinite scroll works well on mobile, but otherwise is a poisonous UX anti-pattern.
  
  Now I lose my spot if I reload the page.
  
  If ajax loading fails for some reason, such as a network timeout, I’m probably just screwed and have to reload and then scroll down a half dozen times to get back to where I was… there’s no direct link anymore.
  
  And what if there’s an article I want to find, and I can’t quite remember what it was, but I know I saw it a few days ago. No longer can I skip ahead quickly several pages. I have to scroll and wait for things to load. And before I could simply go up and change page 2 to be page 5 in the URL to skip ahead several pages at once.
  
  I really don’t like it. And I certainly don’t understand why infinite scroll isn’t implemented in conjunction with the HTML5 history API (or with the history.js shim) so that page URLs are maintained to fix the majority of the above listed problems.
  
  Sorry to be so negative, but bad UX is a pet peeve.
  
  tl;dr I love boingboing. Please integrate page URLs via history.js into your infinite scroll implementation for maximum win. Or just go back to regular pagination.
  - http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney
    
    Paginated URLs such as http://boingboing.net/page/2 still work. I’ll look into history.js. Thanks for the recommendations.
No Name

So this is it. Good-bye Productivity. We had some good times… I will miss you. I will cry for you.
http://halfbakedmaker.org Robert Baruch

Read ALL the wonderful things?
RexSchrader

I’m getting duplicate articles at the split line.
bradvert

Uh oh. I used to cut myself off after a couple of pages’ worth of posts. Now I’m locked in an infinite stream of awesome, and will never get any work done ever. Thanks.
Matt Breitkreutz

Is there a way to turn it off? Please?
- http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
  
  I’m not a fan either; infinite scrolling feels to me like some sort of pushy, commercially-driven appropriation of control from the user.
  
  Please give us an option.
- Ipo
  
  NoScript.
  Don’t whitelist “googleapis.com”.
  - http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
    
    What else does that break?
    - Ipo
      
      From my perspective, nothing.
      Running scripts can break things.
      Not running them can mean that something doesn’t work for you, nor against you, until you make it.
      I whitelist every trusted domain that gives me a functionality I desire, but I feel no compunction for not running scripts that don’t benefit me.
Guest

When I “J” to the bottom it goes back to the top of the site, where it stops I can wheel back to that spot on the site, ’til it gets to the bottom and J and K are not workin a-gaiiin.
tilthouse

“It couldn’t possibly be bottomless.”
“Well, for all intents and purposes.”
http://weirdly.net Jacob Ewing

As noted by others, there seems to be an interesting glitch of duplicate articles showing up. Presumably due to the aforementioned action of scrolling down partially and sitting idle for awhile.

Nice though.
unaboomer

Please tell the rest of the internet about this feature please.
jimh

Awesome news, and at least SIXTY TWO TIMES more awesome when accompanied by Hyperbole and a Half artwork!!!
- niktemadur
  
  The half artwork manages to be disturbing and adorable at the same time.
DevinC

This is awesome. Thank you BoingBoing.
http://curiouscat.wordpress.com/ John Hunter

You have one the same very annoying “features” of others “upgrading” which is if I have gotten to “page 3″ then click on something read it and go back you put me on page 1 and I have to scroll through and wait while the content I already loaded previously is reloaded… I sadly find so many of these javascript “enhancements” are just annoying.

Reading the comments you all do at least seem to be trying to fix some of the annoyances added.
- Guest
  
  “things” can be really “annoying”. I agree.
  
  Might I suggest you open links into new tabs? Also, maybe some proofreading would help your suggestions gain traction?
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1409228320 Randall Cooper

Thank you, BoingBoingers. We love you, too!
labargmd

So glad that ..oing.net/page/n/ still works! That’s the way to catch up on some days of missed bB on a tablet that doesn’t have enough RAM! Thanks for all you do, boingers!
spool32

Thank you very much for this. I’d given up on reading BoingBoing because the page seemed to freeze Chrome for 20s or so. Glad to see the site is faster now!
cookie_b

If you click out to read a linked article then hit back, it doesn’t go back to the same depth in the page as the article you clicked out from, it goes to the top of the page and you have to scroll down to where you were. Inconvenient, and if it’s been a day or two and you’re starting at the oldest unread, it can take a long time to get back there.

And if you’re going to do this (endless going down) then you might as well implement the corollary (endless going up): when you get to the top, pull down to get anything new that’s shown up in the meantime, like on iOS (“Pull to refresh”).
Keith Anselm

That will destroy my RAM to get far back. Will you implement a page view as well?
hostile_17

Top job… really like the loading of more content.
bobtwells

Nooooo! The end of page was my reminder to get back to work, now nothing will get done!
http://twitter.com/mklprc Michael Pearce

I reached the end of the page. Now what?