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Linux Gazette #170 is out
December's possibly gloomy outlook for Linux Gazette seems to have turned around as the January issue is out with a full complement of articles. On the back page, editor-in-chief Ben Okopnik writes about the response to December's edition:
"Last month, in this very space, I asked for you, our readers, to write in; to let us know that you were reading LG, that it mattered to you - in short, to tell us whether LG's continued existence was a value to the Linux community, as I believe it is. The response has been nothing short of phenomenal and tremendously heartening: for the last month, I've been buried under a huge pile of supportive email from all over the world, with a number of offers of help and ideas for improvement."
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Linux Gazette #170 is out Posted Jan 5, 2010 15:52 UTC (Tue) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link]
The quality is rather poor in this Linux Gazette. In three articles I found one malformed (broken) URL and three links to non-existent pages.
Linux Gazette #170 is out Posted Jan 5, 2010 19:33 UTC (Tue) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link] I found what I believe MattPerry is calling a "malformed (broken) URL", in http://linuxgazette.net/170/lg_tips.html, where this command line has a spurious hyperlink on the latter portion of the line starting with "http:"
That's less a "malformed (broken) URL" than it is a command strings that should not have been HTMLised by the production scripts, but was parsed as one in error. (Did MattPerry think that was an actual hyperlink? Really?) I've called that parsing glitch to the editor's attention. W3C Link Checker finds two (not three) claimed 404 links in the issue's production front- matter (but none in the issue itself): http://linuxgazette.net/170/lg.rss and http://linuxgazette.net/170/lg.rdf. The first of those is a false-positive: The link does pull up lg.rss. The second is a real 404. I'm asking the editor if he's aware that the RDF feature is apparently broken. I'm guessing MattPerry ran the same validator, counted three errors, and classed them all as "links to non-existent pages". W3C Link Checker does report a third item, but it's not an error: It reports that the link to http://linuxgazette.net/search.html is "(N/A) Forbidden by robots.txt", and would need manual checking. That's correct: The search page is marked off from crawlers deliberately. That is not an HTML error. Rick Moen
Linux Gazette #170 is out Posted Jan 7, 2010 1:08 UTC (Thu) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link]
Hi Rick,
I found all the broken links by clicking on them to follow them and read the pages, not from running validation software. The broken links are as follows:
1. On page http://linuxgazette.net/170/googledns.html the link to "OpenDNS" is malformed as http://http//openwrt.org/
2. On page http://linuxgazette.net/170/lan.html the link to "iterative service" goes to http://www.inetdaemon.com/tutorials/internet/dns/iterativ... which returns a page not found error.
3. On page http://linuxgazette.net/170/okopnik.html I clicked on "wife" and "son" links in the author's bio. Both links returned 404 errors.
Those were the only articles I read. I enjoyed reading your DNS articles, however, after finding so many broken links I didn't bother to read the other articles. If the editors can't take the time to make sure what they publish is correct, I don't want to invest my time on their site. Whoever edits the Linux Gazette should have caught these problems during proofreading. That's why I felt the quality was poor.
Linux Gazette #170 is out Posted Jan 7, 2010 23:54 UTC (Thu) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link] (Thanks for the HTML corrections, Matt. Really.)MattPerry wrote: On page http://linuxgazette.net/170/googledns.html the link to "OpenWRT" is malformed as http://http//openwrt.org/ That one's actually my fault, as article author: The note about OpenWRT was a late addition, and the URL screwup was in my original text that I sent up to slightly expand the article text. As chief copyeditor, I always warn Ben and Kat that I'll probably not be able to fully copyedit my own work, because that's inherent in the situation, and it's a vanishingly rare copyeditor who can. But of course it's my fault, anyway. 2. On page http://linuxgazette.net/170/lan.html the link to "iterative service" goes to http://www.inetdaemon.com/tutorials/internet/dns/iterativ... which returns a page not found error. That's true now, but was not true when we went to press. You've just experienced a "Welcome to the Internet" moment, I would say: Link-rot is a reality, and even magazine editors' admittedly awesome powers cannot prevent it. 3. On page http://linuxgazette.net/170/okopnik.html I clicked on "wife" and "son" links in the author's bio. Both links returned 404 errors. True. Seems to be a flaw in the production script: Author Ben Okopnik's bio got automatically appended to his article, and it include relative links to "tanaka-okopnik.html" and "okopnik1.html" that were in the same dir (/authors) where all bio paragraphs are stored in the production tree -- which would have worked if the basedir had still been /authors, but it was /170. It's possible that sideways links between bios cannot work under the current scheme, especially given that LG contents must be mirroring-friendly and thus cannot use absolute pathing. If the editors can't take the time to make sure what they publish is correct, I don't want to invest my time on their site. That's of course your privilege, but the Gazette is much less a "site" than it is a monthly published magazine -- which is my way of saying it's primarily about the substantive contents, not HTML markup. We're delighted to get comments helping us to have good markup, so yours is useful and appreciated. At the same time, we're even more delighted to get feedback about the contents of the magazine. Rick Moen
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