Meta: How do I navigate to see my oldest comments?
Title says it all, really. I was thinking about writing a post encouraging looking back on ones LW comments over the past year or so to see how much ones views have changed, how much more or less they’ve changed than expected, what weaknesses have been patched, what themes have become prominent, what values have changed, et cetera. Ideally there’d be a structured and optimally informative way of doing so. I plan on looking at the social psychology literature to see what they recommend, if anything. Anyway, yeah, it’d be cool if I had a way of instantly navigating to my least recent comment, ’cuz using Google search and all probably works but it’s not something I want to recommend to others in a post. Also, any comments or critiques on the idea of such a post are welcome. Thanks yo!
I wrote a script that puts all of someone’s posts and comments on one long page, for easy backup and searching.
http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/lesswrong_user.php
Hugely useful. Thanks!
Alas, my computer only loaded Eliezer’s page back to here.
NB: This won’t get to the very beginning if you have lots and lots of comments.
That should be fixed now. The server that hosts the script underwent a major upgrade a few months ago, which fixed the out of memory error that was happening earlier. I just tested the script on your user name, and it got to the very beginning.
That’s extremely cool.
Unfortunately, the result is a page which is so large it slows my computer down. I don’t know whether that’s a usability problem it’s reasonable for you to care about, or I should deal with it. Better computer? More patience?
Is there a list of scripts for LW?
There’s not much I can do about it on my end, given that the goal is to have a single page with all of someone’s LW writings on it. I suggest that you try another browser, or give your computer more RAM. (I have 8G of RAM and use Firefox 5, and do not notice any significant slowdown when using that script.)
I’ve only got 1G of RAM, so that may be it.
(Netbook 2GB RAM Atom processor Windows 7 Chrome 12 moderate slowdown while loading but nothing too bad.)
Thanks for sharing the script!
The comment number is after the underscore, the very last thing, and each spot is base 36, from 0 to 9 and then a to z. Changing the number by hand works fine. Knowing that the bottom is probably 0000, we can do a search for the first comment without much fuss. The first spot is 1, next is… oh hey there’s your first comment.
http://lesswrong.com/user/Will_Newsome/?count=21&after=t1_1pzz
If you switch the “after” to “before,” you don’t need to do a search:
http://lesswrong.com/user/Will_Newsome/overview/?before=t1_1&count=100000
I set count large to get a working “prev” button.
Funny how Michael Vassar wrote my first comment, not me. Thanks Manfred!