Hey everyone,

Even with LexPoMo starting next week, we have a lot of updates and new features coming soon to the Writing Challenge website. The first one was the new design, courtesy of Mediocre Creative.

The second big update is the new Views I have for the Participants List, which includes the improved Classic View, the minimalistic Accordion View, and the more photo-focused Gallery View.

Classic View

The main problem with the old view was how long it took to load, especially when we started getting 150+ registrants, many of them uploading photos.

To make this a faster-loading experience, I implemented an “Infinite Scroll” feature. This works by loading the first 5 participants’ entries. Then, when you scroll down, it loads the next 5. This continues until you reach the bottom of the list.

Not only that, but the image thumbnails now appear after the rest of the page has already loaded. That might not sound like a big deal for users, but in combination with the Infinite Scroll, this “Lazy Load” approach gives a much faster-loading experience.

Accordion View

I understand that some people like having the entire list of registrants available so they can do CTRL/CMD+F and find someone’s name. For those people, I unveil the new Accordion View!

Once you’ve found the poet’s name you’re interested in, just click it and you’ll see their full entry.

But if this is too minimalistic and you’d prefer to see everyone’s profile pic…

Gallery View

This combines the Infinite Scroll and Lazy Load functionality of the previous features, but organizes everything into a photo gallery with the poets’ photos or names. To see their complete entry (including the high resolution version of their profile pic), just click their thumbnail.

Not only are these views optimized for performance and catered to different experiences, but your preferred default is saved and they are responsively built for mobile viewing:

So let me know how you like the changes. Also, if you have any suggestions, send them through the contact form. Even if you don’t get a quick response, I assure you that Christopher or I am reading them.

And also feel free to share your thoughts int he comments below.