"Earmarks"--continue where you left off

I've been browsing through the entire gallery of danbooru in order to tag some badly tagged ones (I know, I have too much free time, being a freelancer is AWESOME).

Anyway, I've come across a problem of sorts. Maybe there's a way to do this already that I just haven't figured out, but... If I stop browsing now, and come back later to continue, I find that due to the many new uploads, the images have "moved".

I was trying to think of a solution for this and I came up with something like a bookmark. I'll call it earmarking.

Basically what it does is it lets you select an image, and you can just start your searches from that image downward. In my case I'm actually browsing everything, so I would just keep on browsing down. (I don't know if I should add a trac for this, so I'll wait with that until albert says something.)

I made some really ghetto Photoshops (more ghetto than last time) to demonstrate the principle, and a little story!
--
http://i12.tinypic.com/6tpcif4.png
Here you are at an image, and you were browing the site for all touhou images, but now you have to go to work. You'd really like to continue from here. What to do? Simply earmark it!

http://i4.tinypic.com/6wp6e0n.png
Come back home, you wanna continue browsing where you left off. Simple: go to "My Account" and click "Browse from earmark", annnnnd...

http://i10.tinypic.com/6lbuiax.png
As you can see, the site lets you know which image it is and you can remove it there. If you put in a search, it only shows results from there and onward.

http://i17.tinypic.com/6urrif7.png
Here you're browsing all images, as you can see the earmark is first.
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I think using a single earmark would be best, you can always remove it and place a new one, but that way you keep the interface to a minimum. But multiple earmarks might work too, then you'd just cancel the earmark, and not remove it entirely. (Deleting them would then work similar to deleting favorites now.)

I thought about whether integrating it with favorites is a good idea, but I thought that wouldn't work as well since I'd just want to mark the image temporarily. So it wouldn't be a favorite, just a point where I'd continue off from next time.

It'd be useful! Honest! I've wished for it to exist three times today! And I definitely shouldn't be getting some work done instead of this! Absolutely not! :D!

What you're asking for is the ability show a listing from a given starting point, sort of like an offset. I don't know that storing this data on Danbooru would be a good idea, since it would probably require its own DB table, if you could set one value in the Cookie, it might be feasible.

If it could be passed as a GET parameter, you could also bookmark it in your browser, and not need to explicitly store it anywhere. (like the "link to this page" feature in Google maps) The only reason I could see this being infeasible is if it somehow messed with page caching, though I don't know that that's enabled right now.

Yeah, that's right, an offset, that's the word I was looking for, also, a sentence with a, lot, of, commas.

Normally I wouldn't worry about it since you can just keep the window open on the page that you were browsing at, and continue when you get back (or even bookmark it as you say), but that doesn't quite work since a lot of images get added in that time. Admittedly it's not a super big deal, since you can go ahead and skip to where you were, it's pretty easy to see. But if you're gone for a week or a couple days or something, and you're adding tags to older posts, it'd be super useful I think!

EDIT: I just thought of another way you could do this instead of these earmarks: a "browse gallery from this image" option when you view an image. Then you could just bookmark/favorite/keep the window open on that image, and then click that when you want to continue from there. I don't think that would even require any fancy flying database-wise... Although I'm not sure.

surasshu said:
EDIT: ...

That's exactly what I was suggesting.

You would have a URL like:
"http://miezaru.donmai.us/post?id=154970&offsetpage=1"
instead of
"http://miezaru.donmai.us/post?page=2"

or something like that.

Unless page caching gets messed up that should work, I think.

Use the URL, Luke.

LaC said:
Use the URL, Luke.

The point he's making is that "http://miezaru.donmai.us/post?page=1" continuously changes, so even if he does use the URL he doesn't get back to where he was when he stopped browsing last.

Shinjidude said: The point he's making is that "http://miezaru.donmai.us/post?page=1" continuously changes, so even if he does use the URL he doesn't get back to where he was when he stopped browsing last.

True enough but it can't take more than ~30 seconds to skip through a few pages to get where you were. I've done things similar to this before.

I'm not saying I'm against the earmark idea (I'm indifferent), just that it's not hard to find where you were if you keep the old URL you were on.

Agreed but it annoys me if I don't remember where I left off.

It does happen that I'll be browsing through... Like, "original", and then get called away or have to do a job or talk to somebody or make dinner, and when I get back, I click the >> and... everything I see is way old. And then I browse through the pages going "hmm where was I?" and it's just a bit bothersome.

Even when I'm actively there, browsing through stuff, sometimes I'll go to the "next page" and like 4 images from the last page appear on it again. I don't know, it can be a little bit annoying.

It's mostly something I would find convenient, especially when I'm looking for stuff to put into pools.

But yeah it's not generally a big deal at all, and the way I thought it up is way too fancy for what it is. :)

Couldn't you just favourite the picture where you left off and remove it from your favourites when you continue?

Zekeltarfos said: Couldn't you just favourite the picture where you left off and remove it from your favourites when you continue?

There's no way to go from the image to its place in the overall listing. So you could remember what image you were at, but not what page of results you were on.

If earmarks were implemented, it would be nice if they somehow remembered what search you were running at the time. (Maybe the OP was thinking this too?) Only giving you your place in the whole massive post/list would be of use in some situations, but someone might want to earmark their position within some large tags, like touhou or mahou_shoujo_lyrical_nanoha. Again, not sure I'd use it, but if it did get implemented it's something to consider.

jxh2154 said:
If earmarks were implemented, it would be nice if they somehow remembered what search you were running at the time.

The search is also saved in the URL, so if an id/offset also was implemented there, the search would automatically be saved in the same way.

Maybe another idea very similar to this is to make a marker for new posts since your last visit. Like the red line from Tokyo Toshokan for example.

Shinjidude said: The search is also saved in the URL, so if an id/offset also was implemented there, the search would automatically be saved in the same way.

Riiight, that it is. So it should be pretty easy to implement, true.

Isn't this the exact same thing as just searching "tag id:..xxxxx" ?

Log said:
Isn't this the exact same thing as just searching "tag id:..xxxxx" ?

Yes. Yes it is. I should have thought of that.

Log said: Isn't this the exact same thing as just searching "tag id:..xxxxx" ?

In what way? I just tried it but I'm not sure what you mean, I guess. How would it let you remember what page you were on as more images are uploaded and the page changes/

Edit: Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, that does work. So an earmark would basically just do that search.

jxh2154 said:
In what way? I just tried it but I'm not sure what you mean, I guess. How would it let you remember what page you were on as more images are uploaded and the page changes/

So long as you remembered the last ID you were interested in viewing, you could use it to get you all the posts from there back, and it would paginate from there.

Edit: I should read edits...

Shinjidude said:
The point he's making is that "http://miezaru.donmai.us/post?page=1" continuously changes, so even if he does use the URL he doesn't get back to where he was when he stopped browsing last.

What I meant is that you're looking at the wrong approach for solving this problem. Why save your position in the database, with all the limitations that that entails? We already have a system for referencing locations on the web: URLs. All that's needed is to make danbooru generate URLs that are reasonably stable for searches.

One possibility would be to make the page number parameter work in reverse. If there are 20 pages of images tagged "test", http://danbooru.donmai.us/post?tags=test&page=1 would go to the oldest page, and http://danbooru.donmai.us/post?tags=test&page=20 to the newest. http://danbooru.donmai.us/post?tags=test would still go to the newest page, thus being equivalent to http://danbooru.donmai.us/post?tags=test&page=<whatever the page count is at the moment>. These urls would appear in the address bar, and they would be generated as the href for the pagination links at the bottom. The labels of the links could be changed accordingly (making you start at "20" when you begin the search, and counting downwards as you move to older posts), or they could be kept in new-to-old ordering.
The advantage of this approach is that you can just bookmark the current page, copy the url from the address bar and paste it wherever, etc.

Another possibility would be to leave the "normal" urls generated by danbooru for search links as they are, ie counting from newest to oldest, but also displaying on each search page a special "permalink". This could be in the old-to-new ordering described above. Compared to the previous system, it's a bit less convenient (though you can still grab the link and drag it where you want), but reduces the risk that someone might get confused by seeing "&page=19" in the address bar and "2" in case albert decides to keep the pagination links in new-to-old numbering.

With this same system, the permalinks could be made even more robust, if it's felt to be necessary. Realistically, 99% of the situations where you lose your position in a search are caused by new posts getting added at the head of the list, so the solutions described above should be sufficient. However, images are sometimes added and removed from the middle of the list (when old posts are tagged/untagged); if one wanted to protect against that, the permalink could reference the id of the first image on the current results page, rather than the page number in old-to-new order. Or, in the extreme case when that first image gets the tag removed (maybe it was tagged wrongly?), the permalink could contain the ids of all images on the current results page, and when you follow it the server would look them all up and redirect you to the earliest position where one appears.

LaC said:
...

I think what you're suggesting with the "permalink" is what i was suggesting except I just used "id" instead of "permalink".

I wouldn't ever suggest adding the location to the DB, that's just a bad idea.