One of the more complicated features of the old site is a thing called selectors. They were an idea I thought of long after the initial code was written, but they were so handy to me that I retrofitted them a bit.
Essentially a selector is a rule that describes a set of games. As there are many sets of games involved in the site, having an easy way to describe them is useful. In the old site, it was mostly the case that the rules for choosing games for a feature were hard-coded, meaning that if I hadn’t chosen the right set of games for every interesting case, the site continued to suck.
However having had that idea once, I am too smart to let it go this time. So for the Favourites and Collection pages (the only ones that are working at the moment) I’ve encoded the rule about what games are displayed as a selector. When I get around to working on the table widget, I’ll make the selector editable, so then you’ll be able to choose your own set of games for each widget.
Another thing that has changed since I wrote the first site is a technology called Ajax, or XML HTTP Request. Those of you who are old may remember a time when you loaded a web page and you sat there and looked at it and it sat there and looked at you, and you were both stolidly passive. And then some pages started doing this thing where you would do a thing and they would change. Well the thing that enabled that was Ajax, which allowed the web page to load new data from the server after the page was loaded. That technology only entered the standards process about when I started designing the site, so I didn’t know about it and didn’t use it.
These days though, it’s very easy to do. It’s built-in to the technology I’m using to develop the widgets on the web pages (Angular, by the way), so there will be a whole lot of it going on. Which means that generally the widgets on the pages will be a whole lot more interactive and fun to fiddle with. And selectors is one of the things you’ll be able to fidde with.
There’s a test page for selectors, which has the documentation and a test bed so you can try selectors out. It’s supposed to be here:
https://extstats.drfriendless.com/selectors.html
At the time of writing I’m waiting for the CDN to find that page and make it available. As I add more selectors I’ll add them to that page, because that’s the page I’ll be using to see whether they’re working.
One more thing before I go. I went to a talk at MongoDB the other night, and they are using this library called Vega for their charting tool. I think I might have a use for it myself.
I love selectors! As you likely know already ;). As a future new feature request – how difficult would it be to draw some sort of graph, based on two parameters you give?
Oh, graphs are very much on the horizon. In fact I coded some today. I’ll blog about it shortly.