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Reader survey followup
Last week's reader survey drew just about 1000 responses -
approximately 25% of our entire subscriber base. We appreciate the time
you all took to tell us what you think about LWN. Fully digesting the
responses will take some time, but there are a few things which jump out
quickly.
About 90% of those who responded were individual subscribers. As it happens, almost 25% of LWN subscribers get their access through group subscriptions, but fewer of them took the time to respond. Perhaps people on group subscriptions tend to be more busy, or perhaps fewer of them follow LWN every week. In any case, the opinions of group subscribers were somewhat underrepresented. A full 50% of the responses came from Europe, compared to 39% from North America and 5% from Australia and New Zealand. It has been a while since we had accurate statistics of where our readers are coming from - the current LWN server isn't up to the task of recording all that information. Once upon a time, North Americans and Europeans made up approximately equal parts of our reader base. It would be interesting if the Europeans have now pulled ahead. There were few surprises in the responses on which parts of LWN readers enjoy the most. It seems maybe we'll have to keep the Kernel Page after all. Seriously, though, the most interesting result may have been the relatively low scores given to the weekly Announcements Page. One of the things we have noticed over the years is that a surprising number of items from that page end up being mentioned in the annual LWN timeline feature. Important stuff goes on that page, but it is currently set up as a sort of dumping ground at the very end of the Weekly Edition. Some changes may be called for there. Quite a few readers were surprised to discover the index of kernel articles. The index was prominently announced on the Kernel Page when it was created, and it's linked at the top of the kernel subsection page. But, clearly, it is not easy enough for people to find. More generally, a number of respondents suggested that the time has come for a site redesign. Trust us, we know that. The current design is mostly unchanged since its unveiling in June, 2002, but it really dates back to January, 1998, when LWN first hit the net. Our purpose was to create a clean, easy-to-read, text-oriented site, and the result has served us well for some time. But it is definitely time to rethink things. That will be a slow process, however. Complaining about comment quality has been a popular activity in recent times, but there was not a great deal of interest in either of the proposed comment filtering mechanisms. A few readers really do want a blacklisting capability, though. Instead, there were a number of requests for a feature which would highlight comments posted to an article since the last time one looked. Both blacklisting and highlighting (and many other potential features) run into one practical problem: the single 1300 MHz Duron processor which runs the entire LWN site is already feeling a little stressed. The more complicated content - weekly edition pages, long comment trees, etc. - is aggressively pregenerated and cached; adding per-user rendering would defeat that caching and force those pages to be rendered on the fly. For various reasons, upgrading the server involves far more expense than just buying a new box. The day when we have to make that leap is coming, though. There was a suggestion that the entire LWN archive be closed to non-subscribers. That is not a step we expect to take. Closing the archive would make LWN disappear from the net for all practical purposes, with little in the way of expected benefit. It is also very much our goal to increase the amount of useful information available to the community as a whole, and that runs counter to the idea of a closed archive. For those who called for more Grumpy Editor articles: you have been heard. Those articles are a lot of work, and times have been busy, which is why they have been relatively scarce recently. There are a couple of topics queued up, however, so expect the Grumpy Editor to make another appearance here before too long. In summary: the information you have provided is useful - we are most grateful. We will be looking at it closely as we ponder changes to LWN to help make it more successful in the future. What will not change, however, is our commitment to high-quality writing and high-quality coverage of the Linux and free software community from within. (Log in to post comments)
New server Posted Feb 7, 2007 21:41 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] I would be more than happy to make a donation of some sort for a new server. Why not set up a page for that? I personally will not care if people donate more than enough and you have funds left over for pizza, or if I am the only donater and you decide to buy pizza some night anyway. I won't expect any kind of return except the new server: no subscription extension, no preferential treatment, especially no mention (you do that and I will take back my pledge :-).
New server Posted Feb 7, 2007 23:17 UTC (Wed) by dhess (subscriber, #7827) [Link] I'd be willing to donate money towards a new server, too.
New server Posted Feb 8, 2007 0:07 UTC (Thu) by Shewmaker (subscriber, #1126) [Link] I would also be willing to contribute some money to upgrade the LWN server and increase everyone's level of service. Please provide a mechanism.
New server Posted Feb 8, 2007 0:20 UTC (Thu) by JJ (subscriber, #2321) [Link] This is a good idea.I'd be also willing to donate money towards a new server with terms presented by felixfix. I suppose there are not too many models for independent information sources of net to generate sufficient income to sustain or even to develep themselves. So it is important to find income-generating models so that we also in the future can enjoy "high-quality writing and high-quality coverage of the Linux and free software community". So go for it and study how it goes...
New server Posted Feb 8, 2007 0:45 UTC (Thu) by grouch (subscriber, #27289) [Link] Ditto. Except of course for a few minor changes in the terms -- 48 pt headline on each page with eternal praise for my tremendous donation, exclusive root access, absolute veto power, and changing the color on the left so it's not so close to matching my desktop.Oh, alright, no conditions (the caffeine did it!). One suggestion: Set up the page as felixfix suggested but include the ability to use credit cards. Making it easy to donate earmarked funds might shorten the time it takes to reach the goal.
New server Posted Feb 8, 2007 2:31 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (subscriber, #2814) [Link] ++
I wouldn't hesitate more than a few nanoseconds before donating :)
The Duron does it pretty well currently though - lwn.net has always loaded quickly here. A big part of the reason is probably that the pages are pretty light (mostly text).
I agree with other posters that I hope it will stay that way (simple and clean), but a redesign would be nice too. It might even draw in a few new subscribers - "bling" is important in that regard. Just look at all the work being done on the desktop front with beryl and such. What is the most talked about in regards to Vista? It's the "bling" stuff. Of course, it is not quite the same with regards to websites, but lwn.net does look a bit old/dated. I personally don't care - the high quality content is what is important, but what I'm trying to say is that some people might not even notice the high quality content, they'll leave because the site looks old and dated.
Sorry for my ramblings, I'll go get some coffee now :p
New server Posted Feb 8, 2007 2:32 UTC (Thu) by airman (subscriber, #7341) [Link] Great idea! Please set the page up quickly!
New server Posted Feb 8, 2007 5:21 UTC (Thu) by duck (subscriber, #4444) [Link] Yes, please set up a donation page for "infrastructure costs" - everythingfrom servers to hot drinks :-)
New server Posted Feb 8, 2007 7:58 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] The offer is generous, and we thank you all. There are a couple of reasons why we'll not be going that way, though.Old-timers will remember our credit card crisis just before the subscription era started. The root causes of that episode - which just about killed the whole show - were (1) a clueless merchant bank and (2) accepting donations via credit card. Since then we have been most careful to avoid both of those situations. More to the point, though, is that buying the server is really not an issue. LWN's needs are modest, and we're not so broke that we can't buy a new machine when we need one. The issue is that the current server comes with a nice deal which covers our bandwidth as well; there does not appear to be a way to upgrade that server without taking on the bandwidth charges. And that is a significant monthly expense. We can handle it when the time comes, but we've been in no great hurry to take that hit.
New server Posted Feb 8, 2007 8:18 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] The offer is generous, and we thank you all. There are a couple of reasons why we'll not be going that way, though.Fair enough. Would you consider a bribe to NOT redesign the site, though? I can't think of many ways it could be improved. It's perfect for what it's intended to do -- deliver news about Linux.
New server Posted Feb 8, 2007 8:42 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] At least keep the color scheme. #ffcc99 has come to be one of my favorite colors over the years. :-)Taking the orange out of LWN would be like taking the blue out of IBM.
New server Posted Feb 9, 2007 2:29 UTC (Fri) by addw (subscriber, #1771) [Link] As a matter of interest ... what are your bandwidth requirements ? How many page impressions ? %age impressions on a Thursday to the rest of the week ?
New server Posted Feb 9, 2007 3:39 UTC (Fri) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link] Hosting has gotten much more reasonable than it used to be. You can rent a decent system (P4 3.0Ghz, gig of RAM, 1 7200RPM IDE) at Servermatrix for about $150/mo. They're on 100mb links, and include 1500 gigs of transfer. I think it's quite unlikely that LWN would do anywhere near that much traffic. The P4 isn't the fastest chip in the world, but it should be substantially quicker than what you have, and the chipset is Intel and well-supported. I've had issues with a couple of Debian kernels falling over on that hardware (2.6.15 was really bad), but I chalk that up to the usual Linux kernel bullshit. When they get it right, it's a solid chipset.
I think there's probably even cheaper solutions... this is just an option I'm familiar with. They have good bandwidth from what I've seen, and are fairly responsive on trouble tickets. Might be worth considering.
Get other recommendations too... I haven't sampled broadly. But I've been pretty happy with the service. (www.servermatrix.com).
(I'm not related to them in any way, other than sending them money every month.)
Another thought: if you put out the word that you're looking, someone might host you very reasonably. You're not going to be a big support or bandwidth drain, and you're deeply respected. If I ran a hosting company, I'd be thrilled to provide you a server in exchange for the occasional Editorial Mention. :)
Site design Posted Feb 8, 2007 0:54 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] Our purpose was to create a clean, easy-to-read, text-oriented site, and the result has served us well for some time. But it is definitely time to rethink things.I hope any redesign will still be light-weight and text-oriented! The current LWN works very well over slow connections and text-mode browsers, making it by far the best way to get the daily dose of Linux and F/OSS-related news when out of reach of broadband.
Site design Posted Feb 8, 2007 1:36 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link] Ditto'ed!
I was visiting my wife's family in Beijing between after christmas, and because of the earthquake, Internet connection was almost dead (2-3 kB/s average). LWN was more or less the only usable page...
Another thing is that the site is perfect as it is, not so damn busy! :)
Site design Posted Feb 8, 2007 3:13 UTC (Thu) by vblum (subscriber, #1151) [Link] Seconded. The format of LWN is refreshingly not bloated with unnecessary frames, blinking extra items, streaming video content etc. It is readable like a newspaper, and that is decidedly a plus - please keep that advantage!(says one who forgot to fill in the survey, sorry!)
Site design Posted Feb 8, 2007 8:32 UTC (Thu) by drfickle (subscriber, #1093) [Link] I agree. IMHO simply replacing the horrid left menu background color (reminiscent of Tk apps) with something else would be a big improvement. Otherwise, I have no complaints.
Site design Posted Feb 8, 2007 8:36 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Do remember that you can change that horrid background color to anything you like by way of the customization options in the "My Account" area...
Customisation - neat Posted Feb 10, 2007 2:59 UTC (Sat) by ayeomans (subscriber, #1848) [Link] I'd forgotten those options. You don't appear to have any selection of font family though, and IMHO that's one of the main items that dates the site to the NCSA Mosaic era.
I'd suggest adding a few more options that change the CSS styles for each component, and to make this more usable have maybe four or five themed settings, such as "LWN classic", "Slashdot", etc. Not slavishly emulating other sites, just picking the CSS elements of colour, font, background.
Which keeps the low-bandwidth info-rich static page options, just makes it look prettier.
Site design Posted Feb 8, 2007 9:27 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] I'm very pleased to see people share this opinion. I missed the survey and just caught wind of a redesign rearing it's ugly head from this summary. LWN's minimalist design is a fantastic breath of fresh air.
Site design Posted Feb 8, 2007 10:55 UTC (Thu) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link] I second that. Please, do not redesign the site, except perhaps to organize the links better and move them around so that new sunscribers can also find the Kernel Index Page, etc. Obviously the existing subscribers that took the survey already know about the "hidden" features are not likely to forget about them and don't need any re-design at all. All that needs to be done is find an easy way to tell the new subscribers about them.
Seriously, I would hate to see LWN put too much effort in web design and I am sure I am not alone.
Site design Posted Feb 8, 2007 15:28 UTC (Thu) by goeran (subscriber, #151) [Link] What exactly were the complaints about the current design? Marketing people sometimes reason that things have to be changed just because they haven't changed for a while. I disagree, and judging from this thread I'm not the only one. :-) Redesigning for its own sake is a waste of scarce resources.
Real problems or misfeatures are different of course. I don't really see any, but others maybe do.
Site design Posted Feb 8, 2007 19:10 UTC (Thu) by wsgibson (subscriber, #7336) [Link] I agree with the parent post and replies! Not much more to add than what was already said.
Site design Posted Feb 9, 2007 1:57 UTC (Fri) by ebirdie (subscriber, #512) [Link] I forgot to come second time to previous Weekly Edition to fill the survey so I second the opinions above. I have been a fan of LWN.net since 1998 and I think there is big value in its design the lwn.net has kept through out the years.
On the other hand I believe that the site appearance scares some readers away and only attracts minimalists, which is already in the readership with lwn.net. I think it is important to attract and draw in new readers accustomed to and having preference over to visually richer sites.
It serves lwn.net and its stated mission to serve community (refering to comments about the Archive and Kernel Index), if lwn.net can draw in those poor souls, who have missed the great written content because they can see and understand the content only through the visual appearance. There is a lot of those, who can't keep their focus on a text, if its layout is visually difficult for them.
Here is my suggestions:
A contest for refining lwn.net design, where target is set to honor its current readership, history and to attract new readership? A chance for fans of LWN.net having abilities and ideas in web design.
A second totally parallel appearance machinery: current is terminal and X for the rest.
Some minor refinements:
At functionality front what I have been missing is how to follow comments? Read/unread or checked/unchecked. I have revived several times MyAccount settings, but been too lazy to try different options. Just selected what the labels tell me them to do.
Site design Posted Feb 9, 2007 2:52 UTC (Fri) by ebirdie (subscriber, #512) [Link] If the previous comment hadn't already enough, I forgot the most important I had in mind.
The guest front page should not break the visually logical and consistent appearance of current lwn.net namely the horizontal short content blocks (as used in "daily news" page for subscribers). I think current guest front page has visually distracting vertical columnar divide, where lwn.net used to have otherwise consistently horizontal content items. The coloring emphasizes the distractions.
As subsciber the guest front page gets occational glimpse as the requires new login.
The guest front page could have static horizontal blocks and below the static blocks the news headlines stack. The static blocks could contain first free Weekly Edition, the latest subscriber Weekly Edition etc. and most importantly the guest page visually resembles to "daily news" page.
Reader survey followup Posted Feb 8, 2007 1:39 UTC (Thu) by grandinj (subscriber, #5057) [Link] My web skills are a little rusty, but it strikes me that some of the features could be implemented with client-side javascript and cookies (or some the newer client-side storage APIs).
Which would preserve the static nature of the pages.
But I suspect a better long-term solution would be to upgrade the hardware and use one of the slashdot-type CMS systems, which have already been optimized over a number of years.
Reader survey followup Posted Feb 9, 2007 5:18 UTC (Fri) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] Let lynx be the judge of what worky-worky and what !worky-worky, say I.
Reader survey followup Posted Feb 8, 2007 2:08 UTC (Thu) by nijhof (subscriber, #4034) [Link] With regards to the announcement section: it seems that the 'important' announcements also appear on lwn.net/daily?That is why I marked the announcements and the 'Linux in the news' sections as unimportant: I've seen the interesting bits already during the week.
Reader survey followup Posted Feb 8, 2007 2:35 UTC (Thu) by airman (subscriber, #7341) [Link] I disagree: for people like me which haven't the time too check the daily news, a weekly synthesis is very useful.
Better performance and longer life thorugh caching Posted Feb 8, 2007 4:23 UTC (Thu) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link] Have you looked at Varnish?
It's many, many times faster than squid for server side caching and it allows you to be quite a bit lazy with the content generating code.
Reader survey followup Posted Feb 8, 2007 4:31 UTC (Thu) by gouyou (subscriber, #30290) [Link] I guess the low score of the weekly Announcements Page is due to the fact that most of us already get the announcements we are interested in through some other channels.
For the highlighting and the blacklisting, it could probably be rendered with a mix of cookies, JavaScript, CSS and adding a class to the comment like "date-200702071221". This method should not put too much load on the server.
Also something to note is that half of the reader would be fine with a longer subscriber only period.
Suggestion about highlighting comments Posted Feb 8, 2007 11:02 UTC (Thu) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link] You might consider an alternative approach similar to the forums of RealWorldTech. It is very simple. Every comment is a separate link that has to be clicked - on one hand it can be somewhat annoying (only if the server is slow, which is mostly due to ads IMHO), on the other the browser takes care of highlighting the visited comments.
Additionally, they have a filtering setting that explicitly shows new comments posted within a specified time : last 1 day, last 2 days, etc.
Suggestion about highlighting comments Posted Feb 8, 2007 11:10 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] The titles-as-links comment format already exists - you can select it in the "My Account" customization area.
Suggestion about highlighting comments Posted Feb 8, 2007 11:20 UTC (Thu) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link] Another thing that I didn't know. Thanks ! I will give this option a try. This only strengthens my point that we don't need no stinkin redesign :-)
Suggestion about highlighting comments Posted Feb 8, 2007 18:08 UTC (Thu) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link] OK, I have tried it and I think it only needs a small change to become really useful. Currently, in "titles-as-links" mode, when you click on a message you lose the context of the parent messages and the parallel subthreads - only the child messages are displayed. So, you eventually need to use the browser back button, or open subthreads in different tabs - it gets confusing.
Instead, I would prefer to always see links to all messages of the entire thread, with the title of currently open message highlighted to distinguish it visually (it is sufficient to not make it a link, since it already is open).
Of course this is only my opinion and frankly I am not convinced that you should even waste time changing the comment system (better to write more Grumpy Editor articles :-). However if you do decide to do something about it, you could consider my simple suggestion from above - I think it should be very easy to implement on top of what you already have.
Suggestion about message highlighting/blacklisting Posted Feb 8, 2007 11:33 UTC (Thu) by elprez (subscriber, #653) [Link] While I'm not a javascript expert, it should be possible to push the message higlighting and blacklisting work to the client side. That would put no extra load on the hard-working Duron - well the javascript would make the html files slightly larger.
It would take a cookie storing the state (last read time, messages read, etc.) and some javascript to manipulate the DOM (highlight or hide messages). Perhaps some motivated javascript hacker will provide an example (or tell me why it can't be done). If not, perhaps a free subscription might entice someone to code it up.
Suggestion about message highlighting/blacklisting Posted Feb 8, 2007 12:47 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] > It would take a cookie storing the state (last read time, messages> read, etc.) and some javascript to manipulate the DOM (highlight or > hide messages). If the message itself contains the date as some HTML attribute (class?), the cookie might need only to contain last visited time and JS could (could it?) do highlighting after comparing the article date attribute and last visited cookie value...
No JavaScript please ! Posted Feb 8, 2007 12:10 UTC (Thu) by npitre (subscriber, #5680) [Link] LWN is perfectly usable with lynx and I really hope it'll stay that way.
Reader survey followup Posted Feb 8, 2007 13:37 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] I missed the survey last week due to other issues. I wish I had seen it though... could you next time make the survey a stand-out feature for those of us who use the left column to skim when real-life crap comes up. I would love to add my 2 bits to the questions:
Individual subscription
When are you going to raise your rates? I could probably go for a level above the one I am currently paying at.
** 1 means that its good quality, but I do not usually need it in my life. Maybe once a year.
Reader survey followup Posted Feb 14, 2007 21:18 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] I mentioned this in passing (and half as a joke) in the last thread, but I'll mention it again, because on further thought I think it actually bears at least some consideration: news://lwn.net, i.e., providing a NNTP interface.
The site is already organized as a bunch of sections (newsgroups), each containing date ordered articles (initial posts) with associated comment threads (followups), so the skew wouldn't be too bad. Everyone gets all the killfiling/scoring/last-read-in-thready goodness they want, entirely on the client side. And any lousy server can push news posts -- they're essentially static files themselves.
Heck, I bet a non-trivial portion of the LWN readership already has a newsreader setup for using gmane -- half the people I know have switched to it for all their mailing list interaction. And if integrating with inn or whatever turns out to be a pain, the twisted project's 'twisted.news' library looks like it might be easy to plug directly into whatever backend gunk you have. (Disclaimer: I've never tried doing anything with twisted.news.)
Site redesign: mobile devices Posted Feb 28, 2007 11:25 UTC (Wed) by sethml (subscriber, #8471) [Link] I often read LWN on my cell phone, using Opera Mini. It's actually not half bad - everything comes through pretty well, although section headers end up on the same line as the following section (perhaps due to overzealous use of CSS). However, the really annoying thing is navigation - the piles of navigational links require several pages of scrolling to get past.
Perhaps you could set up a mobile mode for LWN, eschewing much of the navigational crud in favor of simple pages with a link to a navigation page?
Site redesign: mobile devices Posted Feb 28, 2007 11:30 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] We need better small-screen support, I agree. In the mean time, however, you can get a reasonably clean display by turning off the "navigation box on printable page" option and bookmarking the printable page.
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