Add PM Newest Nodes Sidebar to Mozilla

Install the Perlmonks Newest Nodes on your Mozilla sidebar (for that link to work you will need to enable Javascript. Once it is installed you can disable Javascript again). If you want to see what it looks like before installing, following this link will display the contents in a new window.

Thanks to boo radley for the inspiration (check out his homenode for some cool PM bookmarklets).

Notes

• Conciseness is valued more than verbosity. Node authors are not shown. I find I tend to read nodes only if I see "interesting" people replying, so I hope that this will force me to be less subjective.
• Replies to current threads are not shown. That is, if a reply is posted to a new meditation, only the meditation is shown. All is not lost, however, as the number of new replies is summarised alongside the node.
• New users are not shown. They'll make themselves known one way or another soon enough.
• Replies to older nodes are shown, and a link the parent node is also displayed. If the reply is a reply to a reply, both the parent and root nodes are shown.
• The last 24 hours of new nodes are shown, and are updated every five minutes reasonably often.
• The nodes are categorised according to the section they belong to. Code type nodes (craft, code, snippets et al.) are presented first, SoPWs and replies come last. This is a concious design decision.
• The links point to www.perlmonks.org. If you visit PM using another domain and you do not have a cookie for www.perlmonks.org you will appear to be logged out. I plan to add alternative sidebars to let you continue to surf PM with the domain of your choice.
• Reaped nodes are not counted towards the number of replies to a node, and reaped root nodes are displayed in struck text, only if they have replies. Reaped (reapt?) nodes without replies are not displayed.

What do the colours mean?

The colours represent the age of the post. Red indicates a new node, green indicates an older node. In the main sections, there will be one or two squares visible. The square on the left represents the age of the top-level post. The square to the right, if present, indicates two things. Firstly, by its presence, it indicates that a reply has been posted to the thread. Its colour represents the age of the most recent post added anywhere in the thread. Thus, in the following example...

Disk usage by customer 8 replies

...a node posted earlier in the day (5 hours ago) was replied to 20 minutes ago. The exact thresholds for the colours are as follows:

	Node posted less than 5 minutes ago
	Node posted less than 15 minutes ago
	Node posted less than 30 minutes ago
	Node posted less than 1 hour ago
	Node posted less than 2 hours ago
	Node posted less than 4 hours ago
	Node posted less than 8 hours ago
	Node posted less than 16 hours ago
	Node posted more than 16 hours ago

Yes, the colours suck, the middle range is too difficult to distinguish.

Funnily enough, these images have alt attribute set, and in the sidebar the value is the exact age of the node (rounded to the nearest hour/minute or minute/second pair), however, Mozilla doesn't seem to want to display them when you leave the mouse hovering over them. (But IE does!) Go figure.

I think it was converter who pointed out that Mozilla's behaviour is correct. The correct attribute to use is title, not alt. So I used title. And while that works in this main page (try it!) it doesn't in the sidebar. This is a Mozilla bug. I went to report it and found that it had already been noted. Go and vote on it to try and get it FITNR.

The sidebar is now hosted on my own server. It got so popular it started hitting the daily bandwidth ceiling on perlmonk.org

That's all for now. /msg me with your comments. Updated: 2005-02-02

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