Frequently1 Asked Questions
WTF is RIB?
Reddit Image Browser (RIB) is an image browser for Reddit (duh) built completely with JavaScript. It lets you browse through the frontpage posts on image subreddits like an image album, complete with keyboard navigation and infinite autoloading.2 Technically it works fine with self, link, and video posts but I created it primarily to rapidly and lazily browse images.
How do I use RIB?
Just keep pressing j on your keyboard. Press o to choose different subreddits or add your own.
Why JavaScript?
JavaScript is awesome. Actually, the main reason is that JavaScript runs completely in your browser. Being a poor college student, I cannot afford running anything on the server side, which means no Rails or databases. All interactions with Reddit's API used by RIB are performed by your browser.
Why can't I upvote links or post comments?
Unfortunately, the limitations imposed by same origin policy and JSONP prevents me from using any API functions requiring user authentication. That's what I get for being cheap.
How are you saving my subreddit selection?
HTML 5 Local Storage. It's like cookies, but better!
I want to request a feature!
You can drop me an email via my blog. I will send you a polite reply.3
Things are broken!
See above.
Can I help to fix something?
Submit a patch to the Github repository.
Which JavaScript libraries did you use?
jQuery, D3.js, and Underscore.js. It's overkill for the present task, but I chose D3.js because I had some ideas on doing visualizations like treemaps using the image posts from Reddit. I do intend to get to that someday.4
Where did you get those icons?
Most of the icons used in RIB came from the Modern Pictograms dingbat font by John Caserta. The rest came from the unicode charset.
- 1. No one asked these questions. Ever.
- 2. Infinite until your RAM explodes from the inefficient object array I used.
- 3. Reply may take up to 10 business days.
- 4. Sometime between now and the heat death of the universe.