Scrolldit, A Visual Reddit Frontend

I personally like the minimalistic approach over at Reddit as I prefer minimalistic over sites that bombard you with visual eye candy. Some users on the other hand might like a more visual interface, and that’s exactly what Scrolldit offers. It basically takes Reddit posts in realtime to display to display the media of all media related posts directly on its frontpage.

Posts without images or videos are shown with their textual contents, the rest with the first video or image, and title only. The posts are updated in near realtime, with new posts added to the top of the page and older posts pushed down.

Images, included animated images, can be viewed directly on the Scrolldit website. The same is true for videos that you can also play directly there. Animated gifs play right away, which can quickly become a nuisance, especially on pages with multiple animated images and pages where the animated gif is shown for an extended amount of time.

Scrolldit won’t display any not safe for work contents by default, but the checkbox is right there for you to click on to enable those contents as well.

The default page lists all popular posts that made it on Reddit’s frontpage. A small navigator in the upper left corner offers to display contents of a single subreddit instead. Once you have selected a subreddit, you will notice that you can now select the hot, new, controversial and top listings for it.

The by far biggest accomplishment of the service is the visualization of Reddit contents. That’s great for subrddits where images and videos are posted most of the time, and not so great for subreddits that mostly consist of textual messages.

Users currently logged in on Reddit can vote right on the Scrolldit website by moving the mouse cursor over the item to display the up and down vote arrows.

Some Reddit users may like the visual frontend. Others may dislike it for a number of reasons. From the missing comment count to the inability to block animated gifs from playing right away.

Have you played around with Scrolldit? If so, what’s your take on it?

How To Create Your Custom Reddit RSS Feed

Even though I knew about Reddit for as long as I knew about Digg, I never really used it for a longer period of time. This changed recently when I started to use my account more actively. I personally like two things the most, next to a big list of smaller things. Reddit first and foremost is one of the few destinations on the Internet that keeps you up to date on things that you are interested in. It is either the first site to know, or among the first to post a link to the original source where it all began.

The second is the community that powers the site. It is the comments that can give you additional insight and perspectives, that may mention alternatives or other information that improve the original story.

Reddit on the other hand is not the easiest site to use, especially its customization options require some explaining. When I first joined Reddit I tried to find public RSS feed links for categories, but could not find any that were working properly.

I then noticed that each Reddit account had its own private and customizable RSS news feed. These private news feed are accessible on the preferences page.

If you have already customized your frontpage, you can simply right-click on the RSS or JSON buttons and select the copy link option from the context menu to import it into your RSS feed reader of choice.

If you have not done that already, you need to click on the Edit link in the top nav bar first to customize the selection. All Reddit sections that you are subscribed to are listed in the right sidebar of the screen. You can simply click on an unsubscribe link there to remove a section from the feed. You can also add sections again by scrolling down the page and clicking on the subscribe buttons next to each section.

Please note that your private feed gets automatically updated if you are adding new sections to your frontpage.

You can only subscribe to groups here, and not subgroups. For that, you need to click on one of the listed subgroups on the page, and click on the subscribe link on the new page to add it to your frontpage (and thus your private RSS feed). This is useful if you are only interested in a specific subgroup.

Lets paraphrase again:

• A Reddit account is required.
• Edit your subscriptions on this page.
• Copy your frontpage RSS feed link

There does not seem to be an option to only subscribe to the top stories of a particular group. If you subscribe, you get all stories that are posted there.

Reddit Enhancement Suite, Get More Out Of Reddit

With the fall of the once popular Digg social voting site came the rise of better alternatives like Reddit. If you look at Digg today you will notice that the site took a big dive in recent years. From thousands of so called diggs (that is votes) for popular stories to one or two hundred on the frontpage. Reddit on the other hand seems to have thrived in past years.

With the rise came add-ons and userscripts to improve various aspects of the Reddit site and user experience. The Reddit Enhancement Suite has been recently updated to version 4 for all supported browsers. It adds a custom dashboard to Reddit that adds features to the popular site.

When you first install the add-on you will probably not notice a big difference to the way the Reddit web page looked before. What you will see on the other hand is a new button at the top right corner of the screen (next to the user information) that opens the dashboard, settings console and night or day mode (the latter turns the white background into black and changes various other styles on the page).

The Settings Console is where all the new features and changes can be activated and configured.

Buttons at the top lead to configuration menus to configure accounts, comments, filters, the user interface and users. Lets take a look at each menu:

• Accounts: Option to enable the account switcher which stores Reddit usernames and password pairs to switch between accounts effortlessly. Also configured to show comment karma next to link karma.
• Comments: Adds a comment navigator to easily find comments, options to hide all child comments, live comment previews, keeping track of the comments count, option to save comments and to display parent comments when hovering over the parent link of a comment.
• Filters: Filter out not safe for work contents, add keywords to filter out, ignore subreddits and domains. Add a spam button on Reddit for easy post reporting.
• User interface: The biggest section offers a lot of different tweaks and changes. This includes adding keyboard navigation to Reddit, auto-loading new posts at the end of each page automatically for an neverending stream of posts, an inline image viewer or showing an unread message count.
• Users: Options to highlight users in comment threads, ignore users and tag users.

The Reddit Enhancement suite is available for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari. It can be downloaded directly from the official project website.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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