Popular favorites on mobile site?

April 9, 2010 9:47 AM

iPony: Could we have a link to popular favorites on the mobile site?

Apologies in advance if this has already been discussed. It looks like it was asked about when the stylesheet first came out but never taken up.

Anyway, I know that when I'm reading metafilter on my iPhone, it's usually because I have a few minutes to kill, and it would be nice to be able to simply browse the most popular posts of the day.

posted by lunasol to Feature Requests at 9:47 AM (11 comments total)

Unfortunately that two column layout doesn't work very well on the iPhone, so we need to come up with something new for the iPhone. That's why we can't simply link to it. In the meantime, you can browse directly to the page in your iPhone to see it, then bookmark it. It just doesn't look spectacular.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:50 AM on April 9, 2010

It looks fine on my Nokia.

/zing
posted by Big_B at 10:24 AM on April 9, 2010

Ah, yes, bookmarking the popular favorites makes sense...can't believe I didn't think of that! Anyway, eventually it would be awesome to have a link, but I understand if that won't happen for a while.

Thanks!
posted by lunasol at 10:34 AM on April 9, 2010

ok, just added a Popular link to the menu under Projects. And once you're on the Popular Posts page, there's a new menu item at the top to get to Popular Comments. It looks like this.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:34 AM on April 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

I use Android with Dolphin Browser to access MetaFilter, and the current setup works well - I like the fact that you can "skip to menu" at the bottom of the page.

Why not just include popular favourites as part of that menu?
posted by KokuRyu at 11:02 AM on April 9, 2010

Why not just include popular favourites as part of that menu?

It's there now! Look for "Popular" in the menu.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:04 AM on April 9, 2010

While we're talking about the iphone interface, for some reason the "double tap to zoom" functionality doesn't work in these parts. I think it has to do with the sidebars.
posted by Pants! at 12:23 PM on April 9, 2010

Wow, this is awesome. I especially like how you can see both popular posts and popular comments.

Thank you, pb!
posted by lunasol at 12:57 PM on April 9, 2010

I can double tap to zoom in, Pants!. It's just that there isn't that far to zoom in because we set a viewport size. Try reverse pinching to go even further into the text, but in theory you shouldn't have to zoom much in the iPhone version.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:05 PM on April 9, 2010

If you could do this quick, why can't you do the same thing for the sidebar? All I want is a link to the sidebar in the menu... but Matt said no :(
posted by disclaimer at 7:21 AM on April 10, 2010

I do what Matt says.

But yeah, finding a solution to the two column problem with Popular Favorites has been on my to do list forever. We knew we wanted that in the menu, I just needed to decide how to do it. Since we added the sub-menus when we added Search, it was a pretty quick solution compared with writing new pages from scratch.

I don't think we can add infinite menu items, so we need to consider what we add there. In the meantime you can bookmark it.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:36 AM on April 10, 2010