Hello. I'm Mitch Trale -- a Technologist at PucaTrade. Steady Progress is a series of posts I'm starting today, detailing upcoming technology changes at PucaTrade. I plan to revisit my last post -- Notes on a Boat, Part 1 -- with a follow-up soon, so look-out for that.

With Steady Progress, my goal is to chat about something new we are working on, something we are planning to work on soon, and some important issues we’ve identified on PucaTrade. These posts will appear every week or two, depending on the availability of news worth sharing.

Something New

Our mobile site has improved greatly since launch, but we still have more work to do. This week we have collapsed many elements vertically, so we can fit more information on the screen at once. We have also re-arranged interface items in more convenient ways, while also lightening the load of scripts and image assets to speed up mobile performance.

Changes are coming very soon to Lists, Active Trades, and Available Trades.

Something Coming

We have begun work on a new filter for the Send Cards page. This filter will allow Senders to see available trades from a pool of people who most need to receive those trades. This filter will work for non-automatched, automatched, and package trading. Our expectation is that many people will be happy to send to other traders if they know that those people are active Senders themselves ("Give and Let Give"). We also want a way to highlight people who have not received a trade in a while, so we can balance out the flow of cards better.

This new filter will soon be available through our pilot beta program, which we’re calling Flux. Puca Flux will be a bleeding edge version of what’s new on PucaTrade, and we will use this environment (backed by our production / live database) to help test and refine new features before they are released to the rest of our members. Participation in Flux is voluntary, and will only be available to our subscribers (Uncommon and Rare).

We’ll share more information about this system soon.

Something Else

For some time now, PucaTrade has relied on the “Infinite Scrolling” pattern of pagination, which automatically loads up more results when a user scrolls to the bottom of a page. This was in effect on Profiles / Card Lists, Send Cards page, Search from Anywhere, etc. This system of scrolling has been compromised recently, by a change we made to our page overflow and scrollbar systems, and we must now replace Infinite Scrolling with something else

We are moving towards a “Load More / Next Page” style of pagination, with pre-fetching of the next page’s results to help speed things up. We will keep infinite scrolling in place on pages where it feels good and makes sense, such as Search and Articles. But we will continue to gradually migrate most pagination systems to this new (more traditional) Next / Previous Page-based loading.

This change will go live very soon, and we appreciate your patience if the issues with scrolling / pagination have frustrated you recently.





That’s it for today, but I’ll drop in again soon to discuss what’s on the horizon.

Next week we’ll be running a survey about API access to PucaTrade. Would you use it? How would you use it? We’re excited to hear your feedback on this topic. Let me know on Twitter or via email if you'd like to learn more, or have any suggestions.

Thanks for reading, and for the trades.

MCT is a Technologist at PucaTrade. Email him at mitch@pucatrade.com. Find him on Twitter @johanmagnus94 and @mitchtrale