Your Activity Feed: Actually Good Now

You might notice a new little activity indicator on the site now, right next to where it has always said "Activity" in the sidebar.

That might tip you off that there is something new happening here on CodePen in regard to activity, but that little indicator is just the tip of the iceberg!

We've entirely re-written Activity on CodePen, taking it from (cough) pretty bad to what we think is (eye twinkle) pretty good. Tap that link and you'll see a new drawer slide out (far more quickly, we might add) that showcases interesting social things that have happened to you and your work recently.

The big visual change is that you'll see actual user avatars next to the activity, along with image previews of the relevant items. We hope it makes Activity a lot more clear when you can actually see what's going on. Just as useful, activities are "rolled up", meaning if 5 people follow you, you'll see them all together on one line. All the information is still there, it's just a bit more compact and hopefully easier to digest than looking at a long string of single actions.

We also still have a dedicated page for your activity.

This page will have much deeper lists of activity on a single page, and still be paginated to go back in time as far as you like. You'll see things in here like the actual comment someone left on your Pen or Project.

Keen-eyed CodePen historians will notice that we have removed your username from these activity page URLs as that was... not useful. Even more useful is the fact that this page loads quickly. Users with a decently high number of followers on CodePen probably never even tried to look at this page after a while, as it could take absolutely forever to load (literally like 30 seconds or more, and then that again to paginate). Now it's zippy zippy.

Your own activity is there too for basic actions you take like forking and creating things. That's nice to have so you (or we) can reference if a Pen was deleted or the like.

Like our brand new Following experience, this is powered by a service we are using called Stream. We've got a few more things coming that will be Stream-powered as well as we learn more about using their service to its full capability. Namely, feeds that are more personalized for you and the things that you like.

High fives to Rachel and Klare who took the lead on this feature.

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