A couple of new LWN features [LWN.net]

We recently found time for a bit of site-code hacking, resulting in a couple of new features. First: our long, dark period as the only site on the net without a Twitter feed has now come to an end. Interested parties can follow article posts on either Twitter or identi.ca. We are just beginning to experiment with these channels; please let us know if you have any ideas for how we can use them better.

Meanwhile, as the comment volume increases, keeping up with new comments has gotten harder. We're pondering a number of changes to help in that regard. But one thing which has been implemented is the (subscriber-only) page at http://lwn.net/Comments/unread. This page will display all comments posted on LWN since the last time you visited it (it shows comments for 24 hours on the first visit), organized for readability. The page still has a couple of rough edges, but it's useful now. Again, comments are welcome.

to post comments

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 27, 2009 17:15 UTC (Mon) by knobunc (guest, #4678) [Link] (1 responses)

Cool, thanks for the new features.

I'd love a way to get emailed comment responses to a thread like the way that responses to comments works.

Or individual thread RSS feeds so I can subscribe to the interesting threads.

-ben

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 27, 2009 18:04 UTC (Mon) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]

+1 definitely

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 27, 2009 17:37 UTC (Mon) by michel (guest, #10186) [Link] (1 responses)

I see it's changing as we speak. But I'd love to have this only 1 click away on the menu on the left (perhaps right under 'My Account')....

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 28, 2009 16:29 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Yeah, that's a good idea.

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 27, 2009 17:52 UTC (Mon) by mikov (guest, #33179) [Link] (6 responses)

What's the point of using Twitter here, really? How is it different/better from an RSS feed, except of course the (unnecessary) message length limitation?

I am not complaining, just asking.

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 27, 2009 18:23 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

Without knowing much (okok, anything) about Twitter, I would expect that it is easier for someone already using Twitter to just add another Twitter feed than starting to use RSS for the sake of a single website.

- Just like it is easier for me (and probably you) to add another RSS feed, than starting to use Twitter.

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 27, 2009 18:33 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (4 responses)

Why, you get to follow Jake Edge! Let us hope our esteemed grumpy editor joins this nonsensical 2.0 troupe soon. I want to follow Corbet!

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 27, 2009 19:25 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

That sounds kind of creepy if you read it without knowing what 'follow'
means in twitspeak.

Following Corbet

Posted Apr 27, 2009 20:54 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

Hmmm, true. Still, you have to admit that "reading Corbet's feed" does not sound much better either unless you know a bit of rssspeak.

Following Corbet

Posted Apr 28, 2009 0:02 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

All it means is that you're secretly intercepting Jon's breakfasts and
practicing divination on them. Not creepy at all.

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 28, 2009 2:50 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]

"Follow" on twitter means *exactly* that creepy thing.

Twitter is for stalkers and for people who get off on being stalked.

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 27, 2009 19:26 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

Oh, the unread thing is cute, almost like a real .newsrc only not. All I
need now is the same option on every single site I visit. (Bloody
disconnected chaotic web.)

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 28, 2009 16:50 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Sounds like RSS with all comment "resources" in the site description (which would make for a very big site description, however); the .newsrc is provided by your feed reader. Of course, Twitter and friends have to reinvent this in a proprietary, centralised way.

almost like a real .newsrc

Posted May 1, 2009 16:54 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, I was thinking exactly the same thing. Of course the advantage of a real .newsrc is that I can use my favourite newsreader. Maybe the next round of features could include NNTP; ideally through the Usenet backbones to my local NNTP server, but I guess it should be subscriber-only, so to enforce that I guess we would have to connect directly to the LWN NNTP server.

almost like a real .newsrc

Posted May 2, 2009 22:10 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The images would have to be replaced with URLs, and the occasional table
probably autoconverted into an ASCII table (I doubt anyone would care much
anymore if it blew 72 columns), but it should work ;) LWN is basically
textual, after all.

LWN-over-NNTP, an idea whose time has come!

(Chance of implementation: near-zero, alas.)

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 27, 2009 19:41 UTC (Mon) by michel (guest, #10186) [Link] (2 responses)

As I think about this, I think I'd like it even better if the color of the header bars changes for all comments that are new since my last visit. That way I can quickly scan the original thread as well...

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 28, 2009 3:06 UTC (Tue) by dberkholz (guest, #23346) [Link] (1 responses)

There's a greasemonkey extension for that..

Greasemonkey extension

Posted Apr 28, 2009 6:20 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

It is next to useless (at least for me). You have to manually perform a "mark all" for comments to appear as read, but I always forget. After all this is the web, not a news reader. I would much prefer if it would automatically mark all comments, even if I eventually lose some state due to a crash (or just forget to read).

Unread page

Posted Apr 27, 2009 19:41 UTC (Mon) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (1 responses)

It would be nice to have an option to collapse all comments to a specific story on the "unread" page. Moreover, the collapsed view should be used by default.

Unread page

Posted Apr 27, 2009 21:59 UTC (Mon) by sepreece (guest, #19270) [Link]

Basically, open the page as an index of the header lines that have new responses, each of which would open to show all the new responses for that heading.

If that's too much, just putting in the index at the top of the page would be helpful!

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 27, 2009 20:48 UTC (Mon) by jpetso (guest, #36230) [Link] (6 responses)

Speaking of feeds: I understand the desire to track incoming RSS people in
order to distinguish them from the other folks. However,
http://lwn.net/Articles/$n/rss is really tedious in its current form. I
don't click on "Read more" (in my feed reader) to see the same teaser once
again, I'd much rather prefer to view the actual article - which might in
turn be a teaser, but at least has comments and all.

In other words... can you please, please make that RSS landing page a
redirect to the proper one? Or drop it altogether and just link the feed
to the real article? That would be awesome.

/rss

Posted Apr 27, 2009 21:33 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (5 responses)

The /rss view was added in response to requests from other RSS users; links would go through to something that was often just an announcement mail from somewhere and lose the text we had added. I'm not quite sure how to get that really right...

/rss

Posted Apr 27, 2009 22:33 UTC (Mon) by jpetso (guest, #36230) [Link]

I can only imagine that this is wanted by users who let their feed reader
display the feed item as "complete" HTML page (the site the feed links to)
instead of the feed itself. I cannot really figure out why such users
would complain about a characteristic that they have (hopefully?) enabled
by themselves. Or maybe some weird web-based feed reader dismisses the
feed item altogether and only shows the linked items, which is the only
case I can think of that might trigger the request for the /rss page.

Anyways, here's a version that should satisfy both regular users and
whatever weirdos who came up with this braindead idea: In the feed item,
you add a link "Complete article" as part of the regular feed item text,
and everything else (including the real "link" property that points to the
/rss page) stays the same as it is now. The /rss page also stays the same,
and does not get the added link from the feed item.

That way, I've got (a) the teaser / editorial comment in the feed item,
(b) a link to the actual content and comments in the feed item too, and
(c) nothing changes for the folks who view the linked HTML instead of the
feed item.

/rss

Posted Apr 30, 2009 19:26 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

Is there any chance you could publish the RSS links a bit more widely (e.g. using the appropriate HTML meta tags, so that Firefox, Epiphany, etc.. show the RSS icon in the status bar and allow the user to easily subscribe)?

Thanks! :)

Also, I'd like to +1/me too/second the previous "can we have per-article RSS feeds?" comment.

/rss

Posted Apr 30, 2009 19:36 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

The main RSS feed is in the HTML metatags, and it does appear in the Firefox URL bar. I'm not quite sure where to put the other feeds; I guess the comments feed could go on pages under /Comments.

Per-article RSS feeds have a couple of practical problems. One is simply server load; we'd go from one cached feed to potentially thousands of uncached ones. And I have this real fear of the server collapsing under the load of thousands of feeds attached to articles which haven't seen comments in years.

I've pondered an alternative: a single per-reader RSS feed where each reader could flag specific articles for inclusion. That would mix the comments from various articles, but it would eliminate the need to deal with lots of different feeds, which should make life easier for readers too.

The "email notifications for any comments on this article" idea will happen at some point. The biggest obstacle there is just usability issues; I worry that adding more buttons to every article risks making site harder to deal with. It just needs some thought.

/rss

Posted Apr 30, 2009 23:50 UTC (Thu) by knobunc (guest, #4678) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks for the feedback. I'd love a customizable feed... The real win of the per-thread one would be grouping of related comments, but I should take that up with my feed reader (BlogBridge) I suppose.

BTW where does the "your unread comments" page actually get linked to on the site?

Thanks, -ben

/rss

Posted May 1, 2009 1:44 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

> BTW where does the "your unread comments" page actually get linked to on the site?

It's in the FAQ but not in too many other places. The site navigation needs some thought, I know; we have a lot of things to link to.

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 27, 2009 20:53 UTC (Mon) by whiprush (guest, #23428) [Link]

Thanks for supporting identi.ca!

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 28, 2009 0:40 UTC (Tue) by eli (guest, #11265) [Link] (3 responses)

Is there an existing way to get an RSS feed of all the comments?

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 28, 2009 0:42 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

<http://lwn.net/headlines/Comments> is what you're looking for.

Comments RSS feed

Posted Apr 28, 2009 0:43 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

All of our RSS feeds are on this page. And yes, there is indeed a comments feed which gets you the full stream.

Comments RSS feed

Posted Apr 28, 2009 1:07 UTC (Tue) by eli (guest, #11265) [Link]

Ah, I had missed that. Thanks!

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 28, 2009 6:55 UTC (Tue) by leonid (guest, #4891) [Link]

Kudos for the Twitter stream. While I am subscribed to LWN's RSS feed, my click-through rate is much higher on Twitter. Reason still unknown. :)

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 28, 2009 8:08 UTC (Tue) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link]

Okay, Now that I've had a few times to try the "unread comments" I can only say:
Great! Big thanks, this makes my life a bit easier, and thus, you have my gratitude and an offer of free hugs from a puppy. ;)

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 29, 2009 0:10 UTC (Wed) by dw (subscriber, #12017) [Link]

Slightly strange, but very sweet. If nothing else, a Twitter presence will help increase readership through the mindless streams of retweets that seems to happen over there. You know you're now sharing a namespace with such luminaries as Miley Cyrus? :)

Finally, a feature request. I recently started hacking on a "lifestreaming" type web page to replace the site I tore down a few years ago. LWN, being one of the few places online where I comment in public, would make a nice addition to this page. Unfortunately my options are limited to scraping /MyAccount/dw/Comments, then scraping the result of that scrape for the actual comment text.

It'd be really nice if there was an RSS feed for that, preferably that didn't require authentication.. the magic Google already makes a better spying tool when compared to such a feed.

Thanks,

David.

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 29, 2009 21:05 UTC (Wed) by nicku (subscriber, #777) [Link] (1 responses)

Thank you, Jon.

The only remaining feature I miss is the ability to privately request one frequent poster in particular to write you're instead of your without embarrassing them in public :-)

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 30, 2009 19:29 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Ack, private comments would be *really* useful - as it stands, you have to pollute article comments to make tangential points.

Also, a seperate name-space for comment threads, for meta-discussions - either some quick-hack like a "LWN meta-discussions for the month of X" article, or in-article meta-threads.

A couple of new LWN features

Posted Apr 30, 2009 7:12 UTC (Thu) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link]

The unread comments page is pretty good, although looking at it after reading today's weekly edition I did get a see a lot of comments I'd already read (plus the latest in PaXteam/grsec flaming, but that's hardly the feature's fault). Also, it's not obviously linked anywhere - perhaps under My Account in the left sidebar would be a good spot?

Feature Request: OpenID support

Posted Apr 30, 2009 9:53 UTC (Thu) by bangert (subscriber, #28342) [Link]

LWN is one of the few websites I log in to regularly in order to see the featured content. This seems necessary because the SESSION cookie isn't extended automatically, which seems fair enough. It would be a great help though, if LWN supported OpenID for logins.

thanks

Subscriber front page

Posted May 1, 2009 9:17 UTC (Fri) by gouyou (guest, #30290) [Link] (2 responses)

What I'd really like, as a subscriber, is to have a possibility to get the same layout than non-subscribers for the front page.

In general, I'm more interested in the LWN articles, and the non-subscribers front page with its 2 (3) columns layout make it easy to see the LWN content ...

Subscriber front page

Posted May 1, 2009 13:24 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

You can always get the anonymous-reader front page by bookmarking this link. We should probably turn it into an account preference; I'll add that to the list.

Subscriber front page

Posted May 1, 2009 16:22 UTC (Fri) by gouyou (guest, #30290) [Link]

Thanks, now if the weekly edition could just slip back in the LWN content side ...