Tech Note: Custom Bylines and an Endless Front Page
A couple of new features to announce today:
First, there’s a new option you can set in your ‘My Account’ page, called the “display name.” This is the name that appears on your byline when you post something in LGF Pages; for example, I’ve set my “display name” to my full name instead of my registered username (which is my first name only). The recommended use for the “display name” is to show your full name on articles you post, to make sure you get all the glory and adulation due you in the real world, instead of having it credited to “dude2764” or whatever your registered username is. (You don’t have to use it for that purpose; I won’t enforce it as a rule. But anyone who uses it for non-legit purposes — such as impersonating other people — will find their accounts blocked.)
Second, if you scroll down to the bottom of the LGF front page, below the last article you’ll now see a big button labeled “Show More Articles,” that does exactly what it says: it calls the LGF web server and retrieves the previous 10 articles through the magic of Ajax, and inserts them below the last article without reloading the page. Theoretically, you could use this feature to scroll all the way back to February 2001, except I don’t think there’s any browser in existence that can handle that much HTML without imploding. But it’s very handy when you want to read backward a few days at a time.