How can I return the TwentyTen theme to paginating posts?
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The problem is just that if you go through multiple pages, it gets ridiculously sluggish. That is why I hate when I find other sites doing this, and I hate when my own blog does this. That’s the only problem. Why not have options? As a fellow user said above – why be required to keep page 1 while you look at page 2 (not to speak of page 15), since this diminishes the functionality of the site?
OK, now I understand, from your description, why I could not disable this behavior. You still require that all the posts, starting from the most recent, be kept on the page, no matter what, but one has to click to load additional pages. It still scrolls infinitely, you just have to give it permission if you have infinite scroll disabled.
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Are you scrolling back through many pages to read the posts? This way of loading more posts within the page usually makes things run faster, but I do see that you are displaying your entire post and that each of your posts have many images in them. So this may be why you’re seeing sluggishness.
I’ll make a note of the suggestion for a user toggle for this behavior for the developers, although I don’t think this will cause them to revert the change.
I could give you a few tips that will make this work faster for you, if you’d like. Or, if you’re looking for something specific on your site, tou may also have more luck searching your site using the search bar:
or through your Posts list:
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Thanks. I know the search function and use it regularly – both the search bar and the tag cloud – when there is something in particular I know I want. I just like to be able to scan through the posts for ideas. This is less for the public than for me (though if anyone can find ideas here, that’s great), but for either, its utility is partly from being able to scan, partly from being able to search. I really think being able to choose whether infinite scroll is right for one’s particular blog is important, so I would love to see that as a toggle. Now I know, though, not to be annoyed at individual bloggers elsewhere for infinite scroll, when it might be the host that has caused it :) Thanks for looking into this – much appreciated.
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Sorry I can’t be more helpful. But I have passed on your suggestion.
One thing you could do when you’re skimming is change the URL instead of using the ‘Older Posts’ button. As you scroll, the URL changes to adinnerjournal.wordpress.com/page/2 and then farther. If you want to work your way through page by page, click in the URL box when you get to the end of your page and increase the number by one.
This will load the page separately the way you were referencing.
Hopefully that’s a useful work around! Let me know if there’s something else I can help with.
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Since I wrote my first comments on this topic two things came to light which have modified my opinion on this feature change.
A. One of the results that I detected (or thought I did) when I first looked at the effects of this change was that an attempt to go directly to page 2, page 3, etc., by appending the corresponding extensions to the website URL, resulted in all of the previous pages appearing just as they do when you click on “older posts.” This is not the case, and I’m uncertain how I made that mistake.
B. Having page 2, page 3, and so forth appended to the front page with each click of the “older posts” tab is certainly not an option I would ever consider enabling if given the choice. However, with the theme I’m using (Koi), the “older posts” tab only appears on the front page and page 2. It does not appear at the bottom of page 3, as it does on the theme presently used by berkeleybarb (Twenty Ten). In my case, this fact makes the feature slightly less unpalatable.
What’s wrong with the accumulating “older posts” tab feature?
I limit the length of posts (with “more” tags) and the number of posts per page, but even so the maximum number of posts I wish to display at any time is the number of posts I select to display at Reading Settings. If my setting is X, then there should be few occasions when X + 1 posts is displayed. I can conceive of a scenario where someone on post 10 at the bottom of the front page of a website might want to view an earlier post in a sequence of related posts without having to go to another page. It would be nice if you could add one post at a time to the set number of posts to display. So in this case, Mr. Curious could click on “show previous post” and immediately see both post 10 and 11 on the same page. But why should he have to load 10 more posts to do so?With the present accumulative”older posts” tab feature, WordPress doesn’t give us an X+1 posts option, it gives us 2X, 3X, etc. options. If my setting is X, then there are NO occasions when I want 2X or 3X posts displayed on the same page. The number of posts per page is deliberately set in order to give the page a satisfactory combination of the various factors, including the following:
1. reasonable loading speed
2. minimal scrolling time and distance required to view entire page
3. an attractive appearance
The accumulative loading of page 2 and older pages via the “older posts” tab has adverse effects on all three of the above factors.
1. Adding page 2 to page 1, in my case, briefly raises the CPU usage quite high (~80%) before it falls back to a low level. However, scrolling on this elongated page drives it back up and causes the desk top PC to strain, a fact made obvious by both the spiking of the CPU usage during scrolling and the greatly increased noise of the tower fans. If there was an “older posts” tab on page 3 and earlier archived pages, then I would be forced to make modifications to how I display posts and widgets as follows:
- shorter post excerpts
- fewer images and videos
- shorter total length of front page
- fewer widget items, to match shorter front page length
I could make the front page load much more rapidly by reducing the size of post excerpts and eliminating a lot of the videos, but if I do so then I’ll have to forfeit some of the sidebar in order to keep them relatively balanced (ending at approximately the same point).
2. I presently have only seven posts displayed, so two clicks of “older posts” results in a total of merely twenty-one posts displayed. Even so, because of differences in post content and length, I found scrolling with those two archive pages appended slower and more of a strain on my computer — spiking CPU usage and tower fan noise — than it was when scrolling on berkeleybarb’s website (https://adinnerjournal.wordpress.com/) following two activations of “older posts” despite the fact that on that site more than three times as many posts were displayed (75).
As mentioned above, with the theme I’m using (Koi), the “older posts” tab does not appear at the bottom of page 3, as it does on the theme presently used by berkeleybarb (Twenty Ten). However, should I choose to change themes, or increase the number of posts displayed without making modifications to how my posts are displayed, then scrolling would likely become impossible with one more click of “older posts.” It’s already straining my PC after two clicks.
3. I find the accumulative “older posts” option undesirable with respect to website appearance because it forces me to consider forfeiting attractive features such as images and videos in order to keep the total length of the content displayed on the front page to a manageable level when “older posts” is activated.
Some of themes I’ve seen lately featuring portfolio template or grid-style front page may be something I’ll experiment with in the future, but I’m definitely not a fan of front pages full of titles and two or three-line excerpts. I used to show the entire posts before I learned of “more” tags. Presently, I typically display from 30 to 50% of a post, normally including several images and videos.
Final Note:
I was considering doing a list of Pros and Cons regarding the accumulative “older posts” feature, but I could not think of one thing to put on the “Pros” side. There is nothing I like about this feature. -
with the theme I’m using (Koi), the “older posts” tab only appears on the front page and page 2. It does not appear at the bottom of page 3, as it does on the theme presently used by berkeleybarb (Twenty Ten).
This sounds like a bug. Can you give me a link to the site where you’re seeing this?
Adding page 2 to page 1, in my case, briefly raises the CPU usage quite high (~80%) before it falls back to a low level.
Do you see this CPU usage surge when you first load your page? This type of loading really shouldn’t cause a CPU spike. It doesn’t reload the whole page, just the next set of posts. As I mentioned before, this is usually a faster way to load for most people.
2. minimal scrolling time and distance required to view entire page
This is great feedback. I’ll definitely pass it on. I will admit, I think its unlikely this will sway the developers to revert this change though. Our data shows that most readers do not sift through many pages of posts in this way. Many don’t go back through any older posts at all.
3. I find the accumulative “older posts” option undesirable with respect to website appearance because it forces me to consider forfeiting attractive features such as images and videos in order to keep the total length of the content displayed on the front page to a manageable level when “older posts” is activated.
I can understand this. We try to make sites hosted at WordPress.com work amazing for the majority of users. We can’t please everyone, though. If this feature is completely unpalatable for you, you have other options.
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However, with the theme I’m using (Koi), the “older posts” tab only appears on the front page and page 2. It does not appear at the bottom of page 3, as it does on the theme presently used by berkeleybarb (Twenty Ten).
…so two clicks of “older posts” results in a total of merely twenty-one posts displayed.
Corrections: I’d forgotten that I only have 18 published posts. Close to 98% of my website’s content is in pages, which I greatly prefer to posts for the vastly easier organization of them, despite the absence of tags.
So, there are two corrections to be made.
1. There should be no “older posts” after page three is loaded because there are no more posts to display.
2. I encounter slower scrolling with the third page appended (two clicks of “older posts”) on my site than on than I do when scrolling on berkeleybarb’s website (https://adinnerjournal.wordpress.com/) with the after the same number of “older posts” activations, despite the fact that more than 4 times as many posts are displayed in the second case (18 vs. 75). I’d previously cited the ratio as “more than 3 times as many.” -
If this feature is completely unpalatable for you, you have other options.
Such as?
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Do you see this CPU usage surge when you first load your page? This type of loading really shouldn’t cause a CPU spike.
Yes, but it’s not significantly different than the spike seen when loading the front page, or loading page 2 (with attachment added to URL).
As you correctly deduced above, one of the principal issues is the effect that activating “older posts” has upon scrolling. Essentially, it results in normal scrolling becoming scrolling and loading at the same time or alternately. The problems I’m experiencing when activating this feature are similar to but not as bad as the effects causes by enabling Infinite Scroll.
I’ve always had severe loading and scrolling issues with “Infinite Scroll” on this site and was very glad to have the option of disabling it provided. I also dislike encountering infinite scroll elsewhere. On image sharing sites it often has ridiculously bad effects. For example, on some image libraries using IS I find it impossible to scroll and see each image sequentially without repeatedly backtracking to view ten or twelve rows of images which were bypassed by a fresh loading of the infinite scroll.
For reasons I don’t understand, WordPress long ago removed the option for disabling IS on my site with the following explanation:
We’ve changed this option to a click-to-scroll version for you since you have footer widgets in Appearance → Widgets, or your theme uses click-to-scroll as the default behavior.
I’d like to disable both infinite scroll and “click-to-scroll,” if the accumulative “older posts” is what is referred to by the latter.
Fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la!
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Great elucidation, musicdoc1. Much more of an issue for you, certainly – I’m glad I brought it up :)
shawnajroberts – Yes, I had just discovered that typing in the URL and iterating the page number worked, after musicdoc1 called my attention to the URL change, which I had not noticed. Thanks. It is a perfectly decent workaround. However, I think that with the kinds of issues musicdoc1 is having, it ought to alert the developers that reviving the option of non-infinite pagination would be a helpful idea. It’s not like they’d have to figure out how to program it :)
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WordPress gives us the ability to set the number of posts displayed, but then says,
Oh, by the way, a visitor might crash their PC by trying to display 4 times as many posts as you’ve set as the limit, and you might never know. That is, until they begin complaining to you about causing their PC to crash every time they try to view page 4 of your website.
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But even if this change doesn’t cause PC slowing or crashing, it will inevitably result in confusion and inconvenience in many cases. Who wants to scroll through dozens of posts to get to a post that you used to be able to reach with two or three clicks?
Let’s imagine the following scenario. Suppose I set my posts per pages at 20. Second, imagine that a return visitor remembers that with the previous incarnation of the “older posts” tab there was a post she visited recently at the top of page 4. It was the 61st most recent post. She reached that page by clicking on “older posts” three times. There was some information on that page which she wants to recheck, and she intends to revisit that post immediately. The option of going directly to page 4 by adding an extension to the URL is unknown to her. She doesn’t even know what an URL is. But she knows that she can visit that post with three clicks of the “older posts” tab. She remembers that a couple of days ago she arrived at that post after clicking on “older posts” just three times. It was right at the top of the page! So now she tries to do the same thing. Click, click, click….Uh-oh. Where is the post? What’s going on? It just keeps loading more posts on the same. That’s strange.
Thinking that she must have done something wrong, she returns to the front page and tries the three click trick again. And again her post is nowhere to be found. It should be right at the top of the page. Where is it? Ten minutes later she finds it…three quarters of the way down the ridiculously long four-page accumulation of posts.
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I appreciate all of your feedback. However, for the time being, there is no plan to change this feature. I’ve made note of the issues you’re having for the developers. If you’d like some tips on how to make your pages load quicker with less load on your computer, please give me a URL to your site.
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Please make note that it needn’t be an issue of changing this feature, just of allowing those of us who detest it opt out of it, and return to the original paginated loading method. They have the code for that, just toggle it. What’s the issue??
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The change was made so long ago that I cannot even remember when it was made. There will be no reversion and I am at a loss as to know why this thread is still active. The question has been answered.
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There is NO REQUEST remaining here for “reversion” – only a request to make this change optional. Making more options is good. Limiting options seems unnecessary. The only actual staffer in this discussion has kindly passed on the request, but keeps talking about CHANGING the feature, rather than simply allowing users the option of both ways of managing their blogs. If the discussion no longer interests you, you have the option of requesting not to be notified. Options are good.
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Perhaps you need to read the original thread re: infinite scroll and see what we bloggers negotiated is the ability to disable that setting.
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shawnajroberts – thank you – your participation in this thread is enormously appreciated!
timethief – Per the discussion above, it turns out that the “disable” feature does not disable infinite scrolling, it only disables *automatic* infinite scrolling. That is, the “disable” feature for “infinite scrolling” does not prevent page 2 from *adding onto* page 1, and the “adding onto” is the issue. That is why this thread was initiated. The “older posts” tab must be clicked (so infinity is not automatic) but the older posts *add to* those already on the screen instead of *replacing* posts already scrolled through. There is no way to disable the *adding onto* feature.
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