Journal Spacers

Add spacers to the journal for hour ⌚, day ☀, week ☽, month ⚪, season ⚘ and year ❄. Also separate actions with no date data ✇. Add these to Activity plugin headings as a key.

Having experimented with this I've noticed coding problems but still believe there is much promise.

My first approach was to add a journal iterator to the new pageObject that would insert spacers at appropriate places in the journal. The addToJournal rendering logic would notice a distinctly different action and render accordingly.

The spacers contained a symbol field which identified the spacer as day, week, month, etc.

The spacer symbols should be stored more globally so that they can be used in Recent Changes for both section headings and in long neighbor chains like those attached to Welcome Visitors.

The no-date-data symbol didn't work out because date data can be missing anywhere. It isn't a region of time, even though it might seem as such.

The iterator needs to be separated from the journal so that the same logic, though running backwards, can be applied in the two Recent Changes cases.

Spacers should be repositioned with each journal update while editing. Now they only move on page refresh. They could move as the clock ticks. That might be trying too hard.

For some reason the date calculation of the over disagrees with the date calculation of the journal iterator such that the one-year separator says "11 months ago" in the hover.

Oops. Spacers mess up rev counting in the action click handler. Time for more robust rev numbers? At least spacer aware counting in the handler.

I noticed that symbols for month and hour were absent on a colleague's MacBook.

This issue also affects Chrome on Windows, where the symbols for hour, month, and season, together with the fork flag, are missing.

Is it better to look at an iconic font, like Font Awesome or Typicons ? See Understanding Web Fonts

Undated forks trip up the separator insertion leading to two one-year separators in Wants and Needs's journal.

The separator symbols are a little hard to spot. Perhaps each should start a new row so that they are always in the first column.

Regularly edited pages have more actions in the larger, more distant segments. Perhaps details should be automatically collapsed in larger segments. This could be progressively more aggressive.

The now-relative spacing is less useful when recalling old versions. Perhaps the spacing (and collapsing) could be relative to the version date. This would expose edit history details in a natural enough way.