LWN: Comments on "Welcome to the new LWN.net!"

Substantial response / follow-up?

corbet — 2002-06-21T20:05:55+00:00

We have tried to supply our feedback in the form of an improved site - many, many things have changed as a result of the comments we have received, and many other comments are represented on our ToDo list. We are paying attention...

Substantial response / follow-up?

sphealey — 2002-06-20T21:24:11+00:00

Guess not, eh? Oh well. Still one of the best sites on the web.

sPh

Substantial response / follow-up?

sphealey — 2002-06-12T21:29:43+00:00

Some fairly substantial comments, suggestions, and even (dare I say it?) criticisms have been posted here in the last 10 days. I hope that the LWN staff has collected these and will reply to them in its usual thoughtful, thorough manner. It is always difficult to deal with when one provides requested feedback and then hears nothing after that.

sPh

Link-color settings

Max.Hyre — 2002-06-07T19:08:32+00:00

I'll go further than kune on the colors: There's an option on the (read: at least on my) browser to set visited and unvisited colors. It'd be nice to see them in effect. Setting that and stuff like font sizes (and maybe fonts, even) feels like you want to work in TeX. TeX is great, but HTML is about getting the info to the reader, rather than about beautiful design. It's wonderful when beautiful design is there, but as soon as it interferes with legibility or navigability (on, I claim, any browser), it's time to ditch the chrome.

Sorry, I bet you put a lot of work into the appearance, but if there's a way to tell the browser: ``If your user has set a preference for this, skip setting the site's version'' would probably be more comfortable for most people.

That said, note that it all comes under niceties. This is certainly gonna continue as my top site, and I really appreciate the hard work you all do to get out such high-quality news. (It certainly beats the two ``real-world'' newspapers offered around here.)

Finally, thanks for the Visa donation method. You've got my dough, and can expect more next year. :-)

Mail archive links

slamb — 2002-06-06T18:51:33+00:00

First, I do like the new layout. It looks good and is very usable.

One thing I wish for, and maybe now it will happen since you're in a redesigning mood. The email links on the kernel page all go to a local copy of the mail without any links to the rest of the thread. I'd much rather have a link to a full mail archive, so I could follow the thread if interested.

Can't set cookie

anth — 2002-06-06T13:40:44+00:00

I got this error on IE6 (its not my computer) when I set up my account, but it worked when I logged in later.

Welcome to the new LWN.net!

DeletedUser1505 — 2002-06-06T13:01:11+00:00

How do I get the Alphabetical List of Software and the Software Sorted by license??

CSS px units bad for fonts

dbreakey — 2002-06-05T19:46:29+00:00

Use a recent build of Mozilla. It also supports setting a minimum font size (although in older releases, it's a pain to configure this option; current releases have put the config option in the GUI finally).

Font sizes! (Text too small.)

dbreakey — 2002-06-05T18:27:04+00:00

Nevermind. I'd forgotten about the ability to set the minimum font size in Galeon (actually, I haven't needed to bother yet), and it seems that Mozilla (at least 1.0rc3--don't know about earlier ones) has added that option to the Preferences/Appearance/Fonts tab.

My goof.

Font sizes! (Text too small.)

dbreakey — 2002-06-05T18:22:33+00:00

Actually, Mozilla (and, by extension, Galeon, although I haven't actually figured out how to set it in Galeon yet) has a nifty little option that specifies a minimum font size. Once I enabled that, I've never had a problem (Mozilla requires that all fonts be at least that minimum size, even if the stylesheet or something else specifies otherwise). Unfortunately, it's not a user-visible preferences item (you have to manually edit the .js file for now), but it works on all recent versions of Mozilla I've messed with (Linux, Win32, 0.98+).

Check the Mozilla Organization for more info, or more specifically here. It's under UI look-and-feel issues. Even though this page covers Unix-specific issues, that particular fix seems to work under Windows as well. Good luck finding the config file, though, esp. under NT/2000.

I like it! (But for comment formatting...)

potatohead — 2002-06-05T17:48:46+00:00

Have been reading today on IRIX w/ older Netscape 4.7x browser. Everything worked nicely.

My one real complaint is with the comment formatting. I really like the large text entry area, but that is offset by the fact that I must also provide all formatting hints.

Keep up the good work!

External Links

jimwelch — 2002-06-05T16:32:58+00:00

Yes, I did used the links alot. Maybe when user configuration is up. This can be a left side option.

Text Ads aren't working

jimwelch — 2002-06-05T16:26:58+00:00

Of Course, the Suits at work demand it. At home I use Linux since RH 2.0

Usability problems

sphealey — 2002-06-05T13:28:07+00:00

# On every visit I have to log in again, making the slowness compliant even more important. This is a killer. I used to quickly check LWN Daily several times a day, e.g. while waiting for a compilation to finish, and coming from various computers (geographical locations even). There is no way that I will keep doing this if I need to log in each time in order to get my preferences back and then to discover that there is nothing interesting to be read.

Agreed - this is a killer.

Also, a bit more testing under Microsoft Internet Exploder would be helpful. Although I understand the desire to be "Microsoft-free", the sad fact is that IE dominates corporate desktops today. In the interests of evangalisim better IE support would be a good thing.

sPh

"Dirtier" design?

sphealey — 2002-06-05T13:24:55+00:00

Typically when publications change their design style, they claim that the new design, fonts, layout, etc. are "cleaner" (I have never exactly understood how fonts become dirty, but that is a question for another day).

LWN's old design was one of the cleanest and most crisp on the web. Elegant, too.

I understand the need for periodic change in publications, the desire for new features, etc. However, I would ask the LWN staff to bring up an old and new page side by side and ask themselves: which is more elegant?

I imagine my answer to that question is clear, so if there is any way to customize the new design to look a bit more like the old I would appreciate any pointers.

sPh

Agreed. Also, the cookie checking routine seems to be broken

sphealey — 2002-06-05T13:20:24+00:00

When I go to the "Login" screen, I usually get the message "Cookies not enabled". However, cookies are enabled on my browser (browers: I have experienced this in both IE and Mozilla RC2). When I click "try again" and put in exactly the same userid and password, I then log in successfully. Seems like a problem with the cookie checking routine. sPh

Fonts from user prefs are back! Thanks!

azz — 2002-06-04T11:56:01+00:00

Absolutely; that solves my major concern with the new design. Thanks, guys. :)

Search engine for lwn.net

DeletedUser1032 — 2002-06-04T08:40:56+00:00

> The biggest gap at the moment is that we do not have a search engine
> working properly with the new site; we're working on it.

I have managed to create dedicated search engine for lwn.net at http://lwn.aspseek.net/ a few months ago, and everybody is welcome to use it. I can even fix the layout to fit new lwn.net design, and I will fix advanced search form when lwn weekly issue will be available.

More to say, I can help lwn.net stuff to setup ASPseek at lwn.net, as I am ASPseep developer and big time LWN fan.

What sucks about the new LWN.net!

DeletedUser1148 — 2002-06-04T01:18:19+00:00

1. Border-styles. The thin black boxes around everything look horrible. The lack of padding makes it even worse. 2. Table of contents up top, functional but unattractive. What was wrong with the old sections list along the side? 3. The clash of colors with the green-border logo square (upper left) embedded in the off-orange sidebar! 4. Headline fonts are bigger now. It looks less professional. The use of bold fonts for the headlines, links in the article summaries, and the "Comments" links is ugly. 5. No pre-formatted text in these comments? What's up with that? Now these items are all run together ....

Always put the link in the front page blurb

edgewood — 2002-06-03T20:48:27+00:00

Please, always include the link to the off-site article in the blurb that appears on the front page, not just off the "Full story" page. It looks as though that link is never on the front page if there's a "Full story" link.

I switched to LWN's daily page because I got tired of having to click through a completely extraneous page to get to the actual article at sites like Newsforge. I liked the old daily updates page, donated money to the site when you asked for contributions (which reminds me, where's the link to the contributors page?) and was considering buying a text ad just to express my support. But I'm going to have to reconsider if you're going to a "hide the link to generate more page impressions" model.

Uh... is this just shooting LWN in the foot?

DeletedUser1114 — 2002-06-03T19:03:21+00:00

I agree completely with the feeling that the weekly edition should be the front page. I value lwn.net more than slashdot because it gives me a clean and concise review of what's happening. The rest is extra.

Uh... is this just shooting LWN in the foot?

DeletedUser1066 — 2002-06-03T15:55:52+00:00

If the LWN is at the core of the site, why is it sublimated to a link? I dont need another slashdot site.. geeknews and all the others tried and failed. What you give is a NEWSpaper that is worthy. I did not mind the daily news.. but that was the subliminated stuff.. now it is the main features of the website.

Look and feel detract from content, but mainly I want the NEWSPAPER I have come to enjoy once a week. Daily news is what portals like slashdot are great for. lwn.net/daily was decent but only viewed if bored.. but lwn.net weekly paper was the BEST.. Make that your home page again.. let the CORE business of LWN be at the forefront or be regulated into the netherworld of "slashdot wannabee's" LWN Reader who loved the WEEKLY part in LWN.

customization is not so good if i have to relogin everytime.

DeletedUser853 — 2002-06-03T12:00:02+00:00

Hi lwn.net team, well, u have done a great job. I don't like the new layout so much, but this just depends on my personal taste. That's why i created an account for ur site and used the nice customizing to create a look that i like. Now i'm looking often at ur site but everytime i have to login again to get my own look. Well, this is annoying. I would like to have the cookies with a lifetime of one year or so that i don't need to log in every single time when i have a quick look if there is something new. Will u maybe add some preference for the lifetime of the cookie or something? This would be great thing for me! Thank u again for the great job you do! I really like lwn.net. kasbah

Structured Text?

iamamardeep — 2002-06-03T10:13:29+00:00

what about using structured text for posting comments

Where have the useful links on the left gone?

DeletedUser923 — 2002-06-03T07:05:50+00:00

Subject says it all--I really enjoyed all convenient liks to e.g. Slashdot and Linuxfr...

Welcome to the new LWN.net!

DeletedUser870 — 2002-06-03T02:09:22+00:00

Thank-you for the long needed improvement. Blogging (Web Log) style web sites are the wave of the future, or at least of the present. I enjoy reading troll posts, and like submitting comments myself, even if they troll. Its quite slashdot like without all the bloat. Great job guys, and good luck. - Arthur H. Johnson II

adding newest at the end or at the beginning, automatic quoting

rzm — 2002-06-02T17:27:23+00:00

> I disagree-- I really like having the newest news right at the top.
> lwn.net/daily is a site I visit extremely regularly. When I go into
> "procrastination mode" (which I do a lot), I'll cruise by the site...
> and at an instant glance once the site loads I can see if there is
> anything new.

There may be a way to satisfy both your and my aproach. If we have to use accounts (a small girl in a progressive kidergarten asks: do we _have_ to do whaterver we want also today?) the direction of the news-items list could be a configurable option.

One more thing for TODO list: I would like to be able to answer with the previous writer's text included automatically.

More wishes

mce — 2002-06-02T12:55:11+00:00

If you allow people to set the colors of links and followed links, you should also allow them to set the one of active links. I changed my colors to something I like better, but now I'm being distracted by all sorts of not so interesting links becoming red whenever I happen to move the mouse.

On a related note: I have all my browsers setup to underline links, but on the new site this doesn't work. Please don't overrule by personal preferences, or at teh very least allow me to achieve the same effect in an other way.

And last but very definitely not least: if you force people to log in to make the site readable, and to accept cookies to be able to log in, then please go all the way and also allow them to retain the cookie. If you want to make the users do things that they would not normally do, you need to offer them something in return! At least for me, this will be the killer criterion when deciding whether to continue visiting LWN.

PS: The block outlines really should be off by default.

Formatting

ikm — 2002-06-02T09:52:34+00:00

Why not to provide an option to use LaTeX style formatting, i.e. one or more empty lines separate paragraph, everything within the paragraph is freely reformatted by the engine? I personally think this would solve many problems...

Where should new news go?

Baylink — 2002-06-02T02:03:48+00:00

I concur with Rob's opinion; by all means keep the new items at the top of the page.

On a related topic, with Konq from KDE2, note that the text entry boxes are overly wide, even at 800x600. Boxes I have to scroll the browser window to see irk me only slightly less than ones which I have to scroll (themselves) while entering text in -- a problem you thankfully don't have.

But, to reiterate my email comment, I think you *really* ought to look into a Usenet feed, with a bidirectional gateway to the website -- I *hate* web interfaces; there are too many of them, and the problem is long since already solved: slrn does it quite nicely. Or, y'know, whatever other newsreader someone likes...

I'd be more than pleased to submit design suggestions thereon, if you like..

Oh, and requiring us to do the formatting is ok by me... but it'd be nice if you mentioned what HTML is acceptable...
-- jra

whitespace (was: Suggestion: get rid of Full Story link...)

DeletedUser718 — 2002-06-02T00:06:54+00:00

When comments are turned off (and there is no "Full Story" underneath the article), it looks like there are three blank lines. It would be great if two of them could be eliminated.

Fonts from user prefs are back! Thanks!

DeletedUser718 — 2002-06-01T23:47:46+00:00

That is sooooo much better :-)

Suggestion: get rid of Full Story link...

DeletedUser718 — 2002-06-01T23:40:35+00:00

... just make an inline link in the text. There is too much whitespace on the front page. If you get rid of "Full Story", then people who turn off comments will be able to eliminate some of it. Example:

Red Hat security update to tcpdump
[Security] Posted Jun 01, 2002 13:57 UTC by corbet

Red Hat has issued an updated version of its security alert for tcpdump, which fixes a potentially exploitable buffer overflow in that package.

Left hand column, printing articles

DeletedUser718 — 2002-06-01T23:19:55+00:00

It would be nice to turn this off if there is no useful information there (like the links in the old site).

Related: it would be nice to be able to print the articles without the left hand column. With the column there, the print outs are useless since a good portion of the text of the article (the right hand side) does not actually make it onto the paper.

External links

corbet — 2002-06-01T23:11:48+00:00

The links will come back, though probably not to the front page. It's just a matter of finding the real estate for them...

Lynx - and links

estel — 2002-06-01T23:11:30+00:00

Alas, the same problem occurs in links 2.0pre5. *shudders at having to load mozilla to post this* Also in links graphical, the links and page title on each page are pretty awful. Big black blocks lie to the right of the text. Ugh. But everything is readable, so it's okay.

Not really. (was: Well done.)

DeletedUser718 — 2002-06-01T23:02:20+00:00

> Ignore the people bitching, they'll get used to it ;)

That might be true if the problems with the new site did not include readability. If the font is too small, it does not matter how good the content is.

The way to fix it is not via some account preference. Few new readers will take the time to create an account at a site that is even merely uncomfortable to read, just so they can figure out if they can somehow make the site readable.

In all honesty, I imagine a significant number of current LWN readers will stop frequenting the site if it does not respect the choices made in the user's browser preferences.

Suggested change of layout

DeletedUser717 — 2002-06-01T22:01:27+00:00

It would be great if one could customize the layout to put the whole left column (lwn.net logo, login info, etc) on the right side instead. It's a little too wide for my personal liking, and the fact that I have in my brower always open a column for my inbox/bookmarks/contacts, makes the site feel unbalanced, with the actual content on the far right edge of the screen and where our eyes will look last when reading from left-to-right.

Just a suggestion. Slashdot is doing it right, with a narrow left column, then main content and then a wider right column.

Horrible pixel based web design...

morhippo — 2002-06-01T20:27:52+00:00

You are right, I was tired at the time. But seriously, pixel font sizes are so 1995....

What's good with weekly news

job — 2002-06-01T18:53:48+00:00

Glad to hear you're not dropping the 'weekly' part. What you have built now is some sort of /.-lookalike. Or should I say, *yet another* lookalike. The weekly newspaper has some journalistic quality where the author writes about what he thinks about current subjects, and sprinkles the text with links to more information. That's whats good with LWN!! This is just a list of news.

LWN: Comments on "Welcome to the new LWN.net!"

Substantial response / follow-up?

Substantial response / follow-up?

Substantial response / follow-up?

Link-color settings

Mail archive links

Can't set cookie

Welcome to the new LWN.net!

CSS px units bad for fonts

Font sizes! (Text too small.)

Font sizes! (Text too small.)

I like it! (But for comment formatting...)

External Links

Text Ads aren't working

Usability problems

"Dirtier" design?

Agreed. Also, the cookie checking routine seems to be broken

Fonts from user prefs are back! Thanks!

Search engine for lwn.net

What sucks about the new LWN.net!

Always put the link in the front page blurb

Uh... is this just shooting LWN in the foot?

Uh... is this just shooting LWN in the foot?

customization is not so good if i have to relogin everytime.

Structured Text?

Where have the useful links on the left gone?

Welcome to the new LWN.net!

adding newest at the end or at the beginning, automatic quoting

More wishes

Formatting

Where should new news go?

whitespace (was: Suggestion: get rid of Full Story link...)

Fonts from user prefs are back! Thanks!

Suggestion: get rid of Full Story link...

Left hand column, printing articles

External links

Lynx - and links

Not really. (was: Well done.)

Suggested change of layout

Horrible pixel based web design...

What's good with *weekly* news

What's good with weekly news