IRCCloud Last Read Bookmarklet

If you are like me and participate in several IRC channels but don’t get to be in them all the time and sometime are away from them for several days, then IRCCloud is the perfect solution (a web-based IRC client that rivals any other and awesome mobile clients).  While IRCCloud makes it very easy to load a chunk of history (simply scrolling up or clicking on a bar), loading the history of a busy IRC channel for several days or weeks that can span multiple chunks of history is cumbersome.  I’ve bugged James a few times to ask for a click-once-to-load-all-history-back-to-last-read-message link.  When I recently suggested it again in the #feedback channel, I got some javascript tips from James that allowed me to do the next best thing: make a bookmarklet. Simply drag this link to your bookmark bar:

When you are using IRCCloud and enter a channel that you haven’t visited in a while (your last read message is several hours or days ago), click the bookmarklet and it will load history until it reaches your last read message.  In the rare case that you’ve been away for weeks or months and it takes more than a minute to load all the history you’ve missed, the bookmarklet will stop after a minute; just click it again to keep loading.