Several months ago I announced the Comprehensive Index of Pali Suttas. Today I’d like to tell you about a major upgrade to the software that runs it on the web.
I’m announcing this here mainly for the sake of those who may have given up on trying to use it on older or mobile devices. I’m happy to say that the fully functioning index should work fine for most users now. And for those who are still not having any luck, there is a very basic html version available.
If you visit the index and still see this screen:
it means that your browser still has the old version cached. Try doing a ctrl/cmd + shift + r if you are on desktop or simply refreshing if you are on mobile. (If it still won’t load after that, feel free to send me a DM). If you had installed it as a PWA unfortunately that will no longer work so you will need to uninstall it. (apologies to Ven. @Pasanna)
Now if you are trying to load the index on a slow or older device you should see the following message at the bottom of the screen:
Just click on the link that says “simple version of the index” and it will take you to a version of the index that is purely html and a touch of css found at simple-index.readingfaithfully.org.
The full featured version will work almost identically to the previous version with the exception of the ability to change where the links on the index take you. Now all links will go to Bhante Sujato’s translations on SuttaCentral.net or in the case of Vv and Pv, to suttafriends.org.
There are a couple of new settings under the info/gear icon:
They are most useful to mobile users. Now you can toggle on the various copy buttons. Kind of ugly to have them on, but that’s the tradeoff for mobile. You can also now toggle the sutta names with the locators. Previously they were hidden on mobile.
Please let me know in this thread if you find any problems or if you have any questions.
I’m also interested in starting a private DM thread for folks who are especially keen on the index to give me feedback on features and question on the index itself. So if that’s you, please send me a DM.
As always much appreciation to the whole SC team, especially Bhante @Sujato for all the work that makes the index possible. And a special thanks to Ven. @Khemarato.bhikkhu for all of his technical support and patient feedback.
Nerdy technical information on the changes
The original app was written using React. that’s what I was learning when I started the project, so I just went with it. However it was never really the right tool for the job.
This new version is vanilla javascript. It relies on tippy.js for the tooltips. But otherwise it’s just pure js/css/html.
Where previously the index was built live each time the app loaded, now several node.js scripts build the full featured app and the basic app as html pages prior to being deployed.
Even the very basic html version is still huge by pure html web page standards. It’s an uncompressed 4.7mb and contains over 17k links. But it seems to work on even the oldest device I could find.
Thanks to @Khemarato.bhikkhu, the history is working so you should be able to use the browser to navigate entries you have visited. Also, the anchors to both apps are the same, so if you have a link like this to the simple index:
https://simple-index.readingfaithfully.org/#abandoning-pajahati-pahaana
You can get to the same entry on the main app by removing simple-
https://index.readingfaithfully.org/#abandoning-pajahati-pahaana
On the React version I was able to make it into a PWA simply by adding some stock functions. I’m open to the possibility of having a PWA for this new version, but I will probably wait until the contents of the index are somewhat finalized. Saving either version of the index should work perfectly for offline use since all the css and scripts are bundled.
As always feedback is welcome.
And thank you for keeping us old-device users in mind 
Old-school style 
