The new LWN.net site

Posted Jun 6, 2002 7:25 UTC (Thu) by gjw (guest, #130) [Link]

> So we restored the "one big page" as an option,
> and it is still used by a (declining) number of LWN readers.

I like the big page very much.
It's so easy to read the news offline with the big page,
because you only need to open one page :-)
This is my most favourite lwn feature, please keep it.

Posted Jun 6, 2002 14:37 UTC (Thu) by seanMcGrath (subscriber, #1563) [Link]

The link at the bottom from the weekly front page to the security page is missing. I tried to use the comment link on the bottom of the weekly front page to post this comment, but it is broken.

Posted Jun 6, 2002 15:06 UTC (Thu) by BogusUser ((unknown), #1505) [Link]

Where did you leave the Software Announcement tag?

Posted Jun 6, 2002 15:31 UTC (Thu) by utoddl (subscriber, #1232) [Link]

I don't suppose you would be interested in sharing the code you use to create/run the site, would you? While I can appreciate that you would like to avoid competition in the Linux News area, it seems a shame for the web site creating world-at-large not to benefit from the hard work you've put into crafting your code base.

If not, then perhaps just a tech-heavy description of how you do what you do would be welcome. If I can't use your code, maybe a few of the ideas behind it are novel enough (if not [gasp!] patentable) to be useful to your site-building readership. (BTW, not that it matters in this case, but I did give you a donation. :-)

Posted Jun 6, 2002 16:15 UTC (Thu) by jeremiah (guest, #1221) [Link]

I think the new site is great, except for one thing. Salmon is not a good color. The yellow was good, easy on the eye, calming, upbeat etc. Salmon is just plain distracting from the content of the pages, esp. in the amount the you are using. Please switch to a cooler color.

Posted Jun 6, 2002 19:36 UTC (Thu) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256) [Link]

Under the topic of "Syndication" (following the link at the top of the page) there is discussion of RDF/RSS for pulling in an LWN feed. However I could find no documentation for how one would use this feed.

I was able to find and follow some sample python code for using the XML-RPC feeds through Meerkat (http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/) which could get me the LWN feed and others. However, I'd like to know how to get the RSS directly.

I know that the LWN staff is fond of Python; and that they use it on their site. Perhaps they could provide a snippet of code as an example.

Posted Jun 6, 2002 21:58 UTC (Thu) by mce (guest, #522) [Link]

Is there any hope of more permanent cookies being implemented soon?

If not, I can stop coming back to check (or maybe even at all, although I'd hate for that to happen). I've set my preferences, but am not getting to see them without explicitly logging in each time (and yes, some people do quit their browser when they can make better use of the resources it occupies, so this is an issue). I find the default layout and colours to be so distracting that I'm now having a hard time actually reading anything when I visit. This is not good.

I also really think the black outlines should be off by default. Or at the very least there should be some padding around than text block they contain.

PS: I know I'm repeating myself (call me a whiner), but that's because at I care about lwn!

Posted Jun 7, 2002 19:15 UTC (Fri) by BogusUser ((unknown), #1653) [Link]

I'm not sure what to make of the complaints about color changes - The colors are the same as I've always seen them, at least viewing from the "one big page" point of view. No problems with "salmon" here - it's always been that color for me. Is this some evil CSS-induced effect that I didn't see because I still use Netscape 4.x?

I do have a gripe about font sizes, though. The previous layout was compact and to the point, while the new version of the site blows up font sizes WAY too much, particularly in the item headlines - these were small and unobtrusive before, marked by their background color rather than their size. That worked *much* better. I find I want a bigger screen on which to view the new layout (to see more), despite the fact that I have a 1280x1024 17" LCD screen. The new layout must be very painful for those with lower res screens like laptop users stuck at 10x7 or even 8x6.

Finally, I'm not sure I like the comments idea at all. I fear that the Letters section, which has been of fairly consistently high quality, will suffer as a result, and that the comments areas will succumb to the tragedy of the commons here just as they have everywhere else. One thing I really liked about the Letters section was that it tended to focus discussion on topics and points that were of importance and general interest to the community at large - I'm afraid that won't happen with the new LWN comments mechanism, which is just Slashdot redux. (My own personal feeling is that Slashdot has become nearly useless, with a signal/noise ratio trending to zero. Compare Slashdot discussions of three or four years ago with today's and you'll see what I mean. The average intelligence of posters has fallen dramatically, and none of the moderation techniques tried have worked.)

So, here's a suggestion for a compromise that might work well: Since Letters *will* be written about things of interest and import, it might be best to limit comments to Letters rather than stories or news items themselves. This will serve to provide at least some focus on particular topic areas, although I still fear the eruption of brutal flamewars, from which LWN has been mercifully immune under its traditional structure.

Thanks for trying to improve, but wahtever you do, don't turn into Slashdot - that would be a great loss for all of us!

P.S.: The non-wrapping text entry box is a *really BAD idea* - it's impossible to see what you write in a constructive way. This one's easy to fix. Please do.

Posted Jun 8, 2002 0:59 UTC (Sat) by BogusUser ((unknown), #1786) [Link]

Thanks for trying to improve, I guess. I'm sorry if this sounds somewhat negative -- I guess my biggest disappointment is that you didn't ask for comments before going this far. I'm going to list the the things that give me a problem. (I plan to read the "old format" (whatever it's called) unless I feel the urge to make a comment.) My screen resolution is set at 800x600, and will stay there for a long time. Your format is too big for that, which leads to a lot of horizontal scrolling, both for normal viewing, and to enter text in this comment box. (And that makes proofreading a royal pain.) I like the chance to add comments, but would like you to consider a wiki type approach -- display your article and then make a wiki page available for the comments. The wiki page approach has several advantages, one of them being that, for example, if somebody else had started a list of complaints, anybody else could add to the same list, not start a new list or add a new comment without being able to view the other comments. If you haven't used a wiki, please try one. If nothing else, try going to http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors -- anybody can edit that page. I like TWiki better because you can require registration -- see http://twiki.org. I'm losing track of the other comments I wanted to make because this comment entry process is so cumbersome (because the text area is wider than my 800x600 screen). There must be a way to put whitespace between paragraphs, because I've seen other comments with whitespace, but I haven't figured it out so far. What's the secret? Why is it a secret?

Posted Jun 8, 2002 1:09 UTC (Sat) by BogusUser ((unknown), #1786) [Link]

I can't get the old bigpage format -- when I enter lwn.net/current/bigpage in my browser's address window, I get redirected to http://lwn.net/Articles/806/bigpage, which might be the bigpage format, but is not the *old* bigpage format.