T&G site architecture for nerds

I just noticed something interesting about the design/function of the Telegram and Gazette website. On the top of each comment page for a story they have a ‘bread crumb’ link designed to take you back to the story that particular comment page is a child of. It looks like this:

What’s interesting is that link is actually a script that tells your browser to go back one page in its history. So if I link to a comment page on the T&G directly and you then click that link, instead of going to the T&G story it relates to, as you would expect, it takes you back here to RadioBall. Kinda nice bug feature for a little site like mine. I enjoy pointing out how ridiculous the T&G commenters are but don’t necessarily like loosing the traffic.

Try it here:
link to a T&G comment page

For what it’s worth I’m seeing this behavior in Safari on a Mac, your mileage may vary.

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Post by: Brendan | December 3, 2008 | Filed Under telegram 

Comments

6 Responses to “T&G site architecture for nerds”

  1. Mike on December 3rd, 2008 9:25 pm

    Using Firefox under Linux, and this happens.

  2. Mike on December 3rd, 2008 9:27 pm

    Also note that if you open the article in a separate tab (as I would tend to do), you can’t click back to the article, because there’s no previous page for that tab.

  3. Mike on December 3rd, 2008 9:28 pm

    Part 3: I usually use the NoScript Firefox extension. With NoScript on, none of the comments appear, but the article “link” does work.

  4. Worcester online journalism case study #2 : Real Worcester - Worcester News and Blogs on December 4th, 2008 5:57 pm

    [...] T&G site architecture for nerds: I actually thought this was [...]

  5. J.D. on December 4th, 2008 6:43 pm

    Using Vista/Firefox with NoScript. Likewise, Noscript blocks the comments, but I can follow the link back here.

  6. J.D. on December 4th, 2008 7:04 pm

    As a guy who just got his first laptop about a months ago, this is the first tech article I’ve ever posted on.

    Which means Radioball just popped my noob cherry. I had my desk lit with candles, and had “Total Eclipse of the Heart” playing on on the background as I clicked “submit comment”.

    I hope it was just as magical for you as it was for me, Buck.



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