Tags: listen

I added a long-overdue enhancement to The Session recently. Here’s the scenario…

You’re on a web page with a comment form. You type your well-considered thoughts into a textarea field. But then something happens. Maybe you accidentally navigate away from the page or maybe your network connection goes down right when you try to submit the form.

This is a textbook case for storing data locally on the user’s device …at least until it has safely been transmitted to the server. So that’s what I set about doing.

My first decision was choosing how to store the data locally. There are multiple APIs available: sessionStorage, IndexedDB, localStorage. It was clear that sessionStorage wasn’t right for this particular use case: I needed the data to be saved across browser sessions. So it was down to IndexedDB or localStorage. IndexedDB is the more versatile and powerful—because it’s asynchronous—but localStorage is nice and straightforward so I decided on that. I’m not sure if that was the right decision though.

Alright, so I’m going to store the contents of a form in localStorage. It accepts key/value pairs. I’ll make the key the current URL. The value will be the contents of that textarea. I can store other form fields too. Even though localStorage technically only stores one value, that value can be a JSON object so in reality you can store multiple values with one key (just remember to parse the JSON when you retrieve it).

Now I know what I’m going to store (the textarea contents) and how I’m going to store it (localStorage). The next question is when should I do it?

I could play it safe and store the comment whenever the user presses a key within the textarea. But that seems like overkill. It would be more efficient to only save when the user leaves the current page for any reason.

Alright then, I’ll use the unload event. No! Bad Jeremy! If I use that then the browser can’t reliably add the current page to the cache it uses for faster back-forwards navigations. The page life cycle is complicated.

So beforeunload then? Well, maybe. But modern browsers also support a pagehide event that looks like a better option.

In either case, just adding a listener for the event could screw up the caching of the page for back-forwards navigations. I should only listen for the event if I know that I need to store the contents of the textarea. And in order to know if the user has interacted with the textarea, I’m back to listening for key presses again.

But wait a minute! I don’t have to listen for every key press. If the user has typed anything, that’s enough for me. I only need to listen for the first key press in the textarea.

Handily, addEventListener accepts an object of options. One of those options is called “once”. If I set that to true, then the event listener is only fired once.

So I set up a cascade of event listeners. If the user types anything into the textarea, that fires an event listener (just once) that then adds the event listener for when the page is unloaded—and that’s when the textarea contents are put into localStorage.

I’ve abstracted my code into a gist. Here’s what it does:

1. Cut the mustard. If this browser doesn’t support localStorage, bail out.
2. Set the localStorage key to be the current URL.
3. If there’s already an entry for the current URL, update the textarea with the value in localStorage.
4. Write a function to store the contents of the textarea in localStorage but don’t call the function yet.
5. The first time that a key is pressed inside the textarea, start listening for the page being unloaded.
6. When the page is being unloaded, invoke that function that stores the contents of the textarea in localStorage.
7. When the form is submitted, remove the entry in localStorage for the current URL.

That last step isn’t something I’m doing on The Session. Instead I’m relying on getting something back from the server to indicate that the form was successfully submitted. If you can do something like that, I’d recommend that instead of listening to the form submission event. After all, something could still go wrong between the form being submitted and the data being received by the server.

Still, this bit of code is better than nothing. Remember, it’s intended as an enhancement. You should be able to drop it into any project and improve the user experience a little bit. Ideally, no one will ever notice it’s there—it’s the kind of enhancement that only kicks in when something goes wrong. A little smidgen of resilient web design. A defensive enhancement.

I wrapped up last year with a list of some of the best audio I listened to in 2017. This year I huffduffed about 260 pieces of audio, so I could do a similar end-of-year list for 2018. But I thought I’d do something a little different this time.

It seems like podcasting is going from strength to strength with each passing year. Some friends of mine started new podcasts in 2018. Matt started Hobby Horse, where he talks to people about their tangential obsessions. Meanwhile Khoi started Wireframe, a jolly good podcast about design.

Apart from the trend of everyone having their own podcast these days, there’s also been a trend for quite short and manageable “seasons” of podcasts. See, for example, Horizon Line by Atlas Obscura, which is just four episodes long. Given the cherry-picking nature of my usual audio consumption (the very reason I made Huffduffer in the first place), this trend suits me quite well. There have been a few podcast runs in 2018 that I can recommend in their entirety.

The Secret History Of The Future is a collaboration between Seth Stevenson and Tom Standage, one of my favourite non-fiction authors. They look at modern technology stories through the lens of the past, much like Standage has done in books like The Victorian Internet. There are annoying sponsor blurbs to skip past, but apart from that, it’s a top-notch podcast.

I discovered Settling The Score this year. It’s a podcast all about film scores. The two hosts have spent the year counting down the top 25 scores in the American Film Institute’s list of (supposedly) greatest scores in American cinema history. It’s a pleasure to listen to them take a deep dive into each film and its score, analysing what works and what doesn’t. It will also make you want to rewatch the movie in question.

By far my favourite podcast listening experience this year was with Stephen Fry’s Great Leap Years. It’s just six episodes long, but it manages to tell the sweep of human history and technology in an entertaining and fascinating way. I’ll admit I’m biased because it dwells on many of my hobby horses: the printing press, the telegraph, Claude Shannon and information theory. There are no annoying sponsorship interruptions, and best of all, you’ve got the wonderful voice of Stephen Fry in your earholes the whole time. Highly recommended!

So there you have it: three podcasts from 2018 that are worth subscribing to in their entirety:

• The Secret History Of The Future,
• Settling The Score, and
• Stephen Fry’s Great Leap Years.

I huffduffed 290 pieces of audio in 2017. I’ve still got a bit of a backlog of items I haven’t listened to yet, but I thought I’d share some of my favourite items from the past year. Here are twelve pieces of audio, one for each month of 2017…

Donald Hoffman’s TED talk, Do we see reality as it really is?. TED talks are supposed to blow your mind, right? (22:15)

How to Become Batman on Invisibilia. Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller challenge you to think of blindness as social construct. Hear ‘em out. (58:02)

Where to find what’s disappeared online, and a whole lot more: the Internet Archive on Public Radio International. I just love hearing Brewster Kahle’s enthusiasm and excitement. (42:43)

Every Tuesday At Nine on Irish Music Stories. I’ve been really enjoying Shannon Heaton’s podcast this year. This one digs into that certain something that happens at an Irish music session. (40:50)

Adam Buxton talks to Brian Eno (part two is here). A fun and interesting chat about Brian Eno’s life and work. (53:10 and 46:35)

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis on Kreative Kontrol. This was far more revealing than I expected: genuine and unpretentious. (57:07)

Paul Lloyd at Patterns Day. All the talks at Patterns Day were brilliant. Paul’s really stuck with me. (28:21)

James Gleick on Time Travel at The Long Now. There were so many great talks from The Long Now’s seminars on long-term thinking. Nicky Case and Jennifer Pahlka were standouts too. (1:20:31)

Long Distance on Reply All. It all starts with a simple phone call. (47:27)

The King of Tears on Revisionist History. Malcolm Gladwell’s style suits podcasting very well. I liked this episode about country songwriter Bobby Braddock. Related: Jon’s Troika episode on tearjerkers. (42:14)

Feet on the Ground, Eyes on the Stars: The True Story of a Real Rocket Man with G.A. “Jim” Ogle. This was easily my favourite podcast episode of 2017. It’s on the User Defenders podcast but it’s not about UX. Instead, host Jason Ogle interviews his father, a rocket scientist who worked on everything from Apollo to every space shuttle mission. His story is fascinating. (2:38:21)

R.E.M. on Song Exploder. Breaking down the song Try Not To Breathe from Automatic For The People. (16:15)

I’ve gone back and added the tag “2017roundup” to each of these items. So if you’d like to subscribe to a podcast of just these episodes, here are the links:

• RSS
• Subscribe in Podcasts app
• Subscribe in Overcast
• Subscribe in Downcast
• Subscribe in Instacast
• Subscribe in another app