Last New Features Update for May, I Promise

Hello! Hopefully you've all found ways to fill the last 48 hours or so since I last unleashed new HCC features, tragically bereft of new site news as you have been. Well... your long, painful wait is over now.

Continuous Cream Click Updates
Cream-click counts now update continuously without you having to reload the gallery, whether auto-refresh is on or not. Same tech that's behind the gallery auto-refresh, just more seamless in action. Should be pretty invisible, you'll just see the numbers going up. I think this is a pretty nice upgrade.

The (Hopefully) Final Word on Gallery Refreshing
If you haven't followed the auto-refresh saga, last week I introduced a feature that automatically inserted new captions into the gallery as soon as they were made. Very neat, very hard to do, and fun when the site wasn't terribly busy. But during the heavy capping periods on the weekend nights, it turned out caps were scrolling by so fast that projectile vomiting became the latest HCC craze. So I hosed off the site, sprinkled some sawdust around, and added some wizardly new code to pause the gallery whenever you had your mouse pointer over any of the rows of caps. Brilliant! Except it only worked about half the time. Back to the drawing board, wrote some new code that actually worked, and *BONK* we now have a new feature I don't think anyone actually wanted. Hoorah! Anyway, you can toggle auto-refresh on and off using the spinning circle icon next to the Refresh button at the top of the gallery.


I think this style of auto-refresh is handy if you're lurking, or capping during slow times, but I can understand if people don't love it for full-time use. So I've added several different auto-refresh options to the "Settings" section at the bottom of the gallery that should cover everyone's preferences:


New Caps at Bottom
This is the site's new default mode. Any caps that have been made since you loaded the page will materialize at the bottom of the gallery in a "Newest Captions:" section. These will load in below the regular section of caps, so they won't push any existing caps around, and they'll load oldest to newest, left-to-right, so nothing will be moving in any unsettling manner. When the site's busy I think this'll be a nice feature, since you can read the whole gallery of caps and continue right on to the caps that were made while you were reading the other caps. The only people this mode probably won't work very well for are those who use the in-gallery chat option (rather than the chat frames or external window), since the in-gallery chat will get pushed down as new caps load.


New Caps at Top
This is the controversial "continuous update" mode mentioned above that inserts new caps at the top of the gallery, which will push existing caps to the right. Unless your mouse pointer is over the rows of captions in the gallery, which pauses the auto-refresh.

New Caps Only
This is a new experimental mode. It keeps track of what caps are on the screen, and when you refresh the page (or make a caption), it only loads new captions you haven't seen before (whatever caps have been made since your last page load). If no new caps have been made, it'll show you a full gallery page. I think this could be useful during busy Friday and Saturday night cap sessions. This mode loads all captions oldest to newest, and new captions being made will appear on the screen in real-time without moving any existing caps around.

Full Page Reload Every 3 Minutes
This is the old auto-refresh mode from before I started monkeying with things. Every three minutes, the entire page reloads. Note that it won't reload if you have a caption-entry or caption-editing window open, because that would suck.

Off
This turns off auto-refresh entirely. The page is static and will not reload or load in any new captions.

Note that the spinning refresh icon at the top of the gallery now means you have one of these refresh modes turned on. Clicking the spinning icon will toggle the gallery refresh to "Off". Clicking it again will turn gallery refresh back on, and the site will remember which of the refresh modes you had it set to last.

So, there you go. More options to play with and/or never discover, ha. Enjoy.


Ultimate Archives Favorites Capper Filter
*UPDATE 6/3 I've added a capper filter to the "Favorites" section of your Ultimate Archive pages. This is the section that shows all the caps you've ever clicked, organized by week or all-time. The capper filter drop-down is next to the week selector, and allows you to pare the view down to just one capper's caps. So if you clicked "Favorites All Time" and then chose a handle from the Capper Filter drop down, you'd see all the captions by that capper you've ever clicked. If you chose a specific week instead, you'd see all the caps that capper made that week that you clicked on. This should provide another fun way to browse through your archives.


Random Notes from the Underground
You know that thing that tells you it's been X minutes since the last cap was made? I wrote a new one that updates continuously instead of the old static one that generated on page load. *cymbal crash for no reason*

I'm not sure if anyone noticed the element-positioning issues we'd been having, in certain browsers the cream click totals would move when you hovered over them or when you clicked a cap, or sometimes just because they felt like it. I've completely torn down the ratty web of IE hacks and patches that made up our CSS code and have rewritten it in a nice, clean way that should be much more stable. So far, so good.

For anyone who didn't catch the updates to the last blog entry, I added a few more enhancements to the last wave of features. For one, you can now rename your custom galleries if you want to. Down at the bottom of the custom gallery, where you can change the sort order, there's a new button that says "Rename Gallery." Should be pretty easy to do.


Oh, and after I added that feature to the Ultimate Archives where you can see who has showcased your captions the most, it dawned on me that it would also be nice to see whose caps you've showcased the most. So at the bottom of your "Showcased by..." section, I've added just that.


Thanks to everyone who has been building Custom Galleries, those are a lot of fun and I've enjoyed reading all the new ones. Keep it up!

Glad to see that our move away from Internet Explorer has been received in good humor. I added some screenshots to the FAQ that illustrate some of the existing problems HCC has with IE in case anyone was wondering what the big deal was.

Okay, I think that's probably going to be it for new features for a little while, I need to step away from the computer and remember what the sun looks like. Thanks for all the great feedback and troubleshooting help over the last couple of weeks, gang! And until next time-

*SITE COLLAPSES, KILLING DOZENS*

-Jazz