[octobanana]

> When I'm working with a GitHub project, I commonly want to load up the page and navigate to some files. If not, it's usually not much scrolling to get down to the README.

The solution I'm using currently for the git repos hosted on my personal site [0] is to show the projects file tree above the README, but allow it to be collapsed by clicking on the projects root directory. Originally, the project tree was collapsed by default, but the click through rate was quite low, so the expanded view became the default.

[0] https://octobanana.com/software/fltrdr

[cbsks]

Do you mean that your metrics showed that few people were expanding the tree, so you made it expanded by default?

I would interpret the data as meaning that most people don’t care about the list of files, so it’s better for them to be hidden by default.

[octobanana]

> Do you mean that your metrics showed that few people were expanding the tree, so you made it expanded by default?

Correct, after it became expanded by default, the hit rate for project files was dramatically higher, showing that users did care about viewing the files. Perhaps the UI could better indicate that it can be collapsed/expanded, but it could also be that it doesn't match the common UX found on the big sites like GitHub that users have become accustomed with.

[cbsks]

Ah, I misunderstood slightly. I thought you were only talking about the click to expand the tree. If the hits to the files increased, then it makes sense to have it expanded by default.

[octobanana]

> I thought you were only talking about the click to expand the tree.

That makes sense. It would have been an interesting stat to compare, but the metrics only come from resource requests, as those pages don't run any scripts.

[tedunangst]

Is the front end itself available?

[octobanana]

It's all server-side rendered. I've been considering open sourcing the site, but there's some cleaning up to be done first.