Link previews in roundups

[ianharrigan]

Howdy!

First of the bat, Id just like to say: thanks for the roundups - they are always a great read and its always fantastic to see what the community as a whole is up to. They hold great information, and imo, cement the community somewhat - so thanks!

So.... .... .... one thing that might make the roundups even better is if there was someway to automatically pull a relevant image from a link and somehow display that in the newsletter - i think this would give a really nice visual l&f to the page as a whole rather than lists of text / links. I have no idea how the roundups are generated, how easy or hard this would be, or how best to lay the page out - but i thought i would open an "issue" regardless. :)

Either way, the roundups are a great resource as is - so keep doing what you are doing!

Cheers,
Ian

[skial]

Thank you for the kind words @ianharrigan 😁👍

The first thing that came to my mind when reading your suggestion is something similar to the links on gwern.net, but instead of a text representation, a screenshot or whatever is found via open graph or some other meta tag. 🤷‍♀️ But to be consistent it might be better to stick to a screenshot.

I can't see this working for mobile though, but I'm open to ideas how to make it work.

[AustinEast]

If you just want to stick to image previews, one option would be to display the image in some kind of tooltip when hovering over links with metadata. That way you wouldn’t have to worry about images breaking the mobile layout!

[ianharrigan]

To be honest, I (personally) meant a thumbnail in the actual page, not a mouse over - the idea (at least in my head) was to "spice up" (visually) the page when you look at it - the mouse overs would work, but then i might as well just click the link - a sort of "heres a load of stuff that has been happening in haxe with pictures" is, i guess, what i was leaning towards.

I certainly have no idea how best to lay it out, esp for mobiles, one idea might be: to alternate image, text, text, image in rows - not sure if that would work (or look good)?

Maybe there just wouldnt be enough metadata for that type of thing, or would look all weird in general - just a suggestion anyway - personally, i tend to just open each link in a new tab and then take a look, but for newcomers to haxe it might be nice to see something "all there"... think the armoury3d roundup for example.

Cheers,
Ian

[skial]

If you just want to stick to image previews, one option would be to display the image in some kind of tooltip when hovering over links with metadata. That way you wouldn’t have to worry about images breaking the mobile layout!

That my thought as well 👍

To be honest, I (personally) meant a thumbnail in the actual page, not a mouse over - the idea (at least in my head) was to "spice up" (visually) the page when you look at it - the mouse overs would work, but then i might as well just click the link - a sort of "heres a load of stuff that has been happening in haxe with pictures" is, i guess, what i was leaning towards.

👍 bringing inline pics back has been requested over the years..

I certainly have no idea how best to lay it out, esp for mobiles, one idea might be: to alternate image, text, text, image in rows - not sure if that would work (or look good)?

Maybe there just wouldnt be enough metadata for that type of thing, or would look all weird in general - just a suggestion anyway - personally, i tend to just open each link in a new tab and then take a look, but for newcomers to haxe it might be nice to see something "all there"... think the armoury3d roundup for example.

Cheers,
Ian

An idea I've had for some time is to inline a select item from each category to the left of the category list, under the two buttons, as generally on desktop, there is plenty of space to allow this. But without rewriting the html & css, creating this layout so it adapts on mobile wont be possible.

So short term, inlining a select image at the end of each section or chosen sections would work across screen sizes. Long term a rewrite of the html & css would make better use of the space, allow a design that works across devices etc.