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Some news from LWN

By Jonathan Corbet
August 3, 2016

It has been some time since our last update on the state of LWN itself. That's somewhat by design, as we'd rather be writing about the community and the code than ourselves. Occasionally, though, we do like to update our readers and subscribers on the state of the operation, especially when there is some news to report, as is the case now.

We'll start with the sad (for LWN and its readers) news: Nathan Willis, who has been an LWN contributor for many years and an employee since 2012, will be stepping down at the end of September to pursue an unmissable opportunity to study one of his non-journalistic passions: fonts and type design. We will miss him, but we believe strongly in following our own paths in life and wish him well.

Nate will continue to contribute articles to LWN. But we suspect that the intricacies of Béziers, brush strokes, and kerning are going to take a lot of time and attention, meaning that we will be needing somebody to help fill his shoes. Thus, LWN is hiring. If you would like to write full-time for one of the most discriminating readerships in the world — but also one of the most interesting, engaged, and supportive readerships — we would like to hear from you. This is your chance to make your mark on one of the community's oldest publications.

Speaking of "oldest," the basic format of LWN's Weekly Edition has changed little over the last 18 years. Some pages have come and gone (long-time readers will remember the desktop page, or the once-interesting "Linux in the News" page), but substantive changes have been few indeed. That format has served us well over the years; among other things, it helps us to ensure that each edition covers a wide range of topics. But it can also be somewhat limiting; it is a sort of treadmill of slots to be filled each week that makes it hard to focus on specific areas in response to what is happening in the community.

In an attempt to address those issues, and also partially driven by the prospect of being editorially understaffed for a while, we may start to experiment a bit with the format of the edition. There will be no radical or abrupt changes, but you may see us trying out some ideas from one week to the next. As always, we will welcome feedback or suggestions for changes that readers think should be made.

LWN is, of course, a subscription-supported operation. Growth in the number of subscribers is thus critical to the growth of LWN as a whole. Unfortunately, that growth has not been happening for a few years; in the last year we have, in fact, seen a slight decline. Our financial situation is secure for now, but we would like to see subscriptions grow, which would help provide even more security as well as more resources to expand what we do. So we would like to ask our readers: if you are reading this without a subscription, please consider how LWN is created and whether it is worth supporting. If you routinely provide subscriber links to friends, please consider encouraging them to subscribe. If you work in a company with an interest in Linux, consider asking your employer to get a group subscription for everybody there.

Along the same lines, advertising revenue, which was never a huge part of LWN's income, has shrunk in recent years; this is not unique to LWN, as the whole industry is complaining about the problem. We have never felt particularly good about advertising in the first place; it is an industry with more than its share of privacy problems, and the ads we get are often not appropriate to LWN's readers. We would like to drop ads altogether, but can't quite afford to do that. If, however, subscriptions were to return to a growth path sufficient to replace the revenue we would lose, we would happily consider leaving advertisements behind. There is no doubt that LWN would be better without them.

In summary, LWN looks to be heading into a period of moderate change. One thing that will not change, though, is our commitment to producing the highest-quality coverage of the Linux and free software community available anywhere. With your support, we'll be at this for a long time yet.


(Log in to post comments)

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 3, 2016 21:43 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Maybe if we rename the third section to Kerning News Nathan will stay on :).

Thank you Nathan for all the work you have done here in the years.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 3, 2016 22:51 UTC (Wed) by keithp (subscriber, #5140) [Link]

Hard to counter your argument.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 3, 2016 22:53 UTC (Wed) by keithp (subscriber, #5140) [Link]

I meant to add

Nate -- thanks so much for all of your hard work over the years; best wishes for success in your future endeavors.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 15:27 UTC (Thu) by xorgy (guest, #103618) [Link]

I'd upgrade my subscription. ;- {)

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 18:21 UTC (Thu) by xman (subscriber, #46972) [Link]

I'd totally go for kerning news if it would encourage more contributions from Nate.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 3, 2016 23:47 UTC (Wed) by cengizIO (subscriber, #106222) [Link]

Thank you for all the hard work Nathan.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 0:14 UTC (Thu) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]

Thanks to all the team, cheers and good luck to Nathan.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 0:22 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

Thank you for your work, Nathan. And your new opportunity sounds awesome.

I wonder if you'd be willing to write a bit about fontology once in awhile? I'd be interested.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 1:12 UTC (Thu) by fredex (subscriber, #11727) [Link]

I second that suggestion! more font news!

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 0:39 UTC (Thu) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

Thanks for the excellent work Nate, and good luck for your future work!

W.r.t. LWN, I really enjoy the format. That said, I'm looking forward to what our inventive editors have in mind for the future!

One suggestion is to have more direct contributions by some of the community leaders---through interviews or ask-me-anything type sessions. LWN is enough of of an important publication that lots of interesting people routinely comment on relevant articles, but it might be worth having more extended pieces where they could elaborate on their work in a question-answer type format. I'd love to hear more from people involved either in technical stuff, legal stuff, or community/outreach work; the last two possibly even more so, since they sometimes get misunderstood by the community. Possibly having an AMA where only subscribers can submit questions might encourage more subscriptions, and maybe reduce the trolling that one often sees on that format.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:23 UTC (Thu) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> LWN is enough of of an important publication that lots of interesting people routinely comment on relevant articles, but it might be worth having more extended pieces where they could elaborate on their work in a question-answer type format.

It may be interesting to investigate something like "promoted comments" in Ars Technica, where the editors select particularly insightful or interesting user comments and let them appear promimently below the article.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 2:53 UTC (Thu) by miahfost (subscriber, #51602) [Link]

Good luck Nate! I've always enjoyed your writing in LWN.

Another support option

Posted Aug 4, 2016 4:12 UTC (Thu) by akkornel (subscriber, #75292) [Link]

Consider increasing your own subscription level.

Another support option

Posted Aug 4, 2016 9:13 UTC (Thu) by rav (subscriber, #89256) [Link]

Good idea. I'm now a project leader for 12 months!

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 4:14 UTC (Thu) by stybla (subscriber, #64681) [Link]

I didn't know there are ads at LWN. Adblock for lwn.net - disabled :)

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 14:18 UTC (Thu) by babout (subscriber, #109677) [Link]

Ha! same. Also disabled.

Autosize-Ad & More ADs on Mobile

Posted Aug 4, 2016 4:38 UTC (Thu) by thwutype (subscriber, #22891) [Link]

LWN may consider to use Autosized AD & Page-Level AD & Anchor AD on "mobile page" to gain better result.

Autosize-Ad & More ADs on Mobile

Posted Aug 4, 2016 11:21 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

If you're suggesting more adverts, the conversion rate versus annoyance factor for online ads is such that adding more seems unlikely to produce a better result, and it *will* make the site less pleasant for new visitors, who are the only likely source of new subscribers...

Autosize-Ad & More ADs on Mobile

Posted Aug 4, 2016 21:42 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

As a guest member, who does get ads, they are not intrusive at all. Wish I could afford to subscribe, but "starving hacker" is about appropriate for me at the moment ... :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 5:14 UTC (Thu) by cstanhop (subscriber, #4740) [Link]

Thank you for all the excellent articles, and good luck in your new direction, Nathan!

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 5:58 UTC (Thu) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]

Have you considered taking a page from Wikipedia's book and asking for donatio^H^H^H^H subscriptions? Say once a year, around Christmas, with a banner at the top of the page, with (this is psychologically important!) a progress bar showing the current progress towards a certain goal (e.g. one that would allow you to drop ads)?

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 6:05 UTC (Thu) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

Thank you Nathan, I've enjoyed reading your articles very much!

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 10:22 UTC (Thu) by zack (subscriber, #7062) [Link]

I'm very sad to see Nate step down. I've really enjoyed his LWN reporting, and how it has grown, over the years.
As a fellow typography nerd :-), I'm sure he is going to enjoy every bit of his new gig, so all the best for a bright—and properly kerned—future.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 10:33 UTC (Thu) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link]

Awesome ( I mean, awe-ful? ) news about Nate. It's been a pleasure, both here and at conferences, and I wish you all the best to come!

Enjoy!

improvement suggestion

Posted Aug 4, 2016 11:17 UTC (Thu) by tadmini (guest, #41980) [Link]

Just my 2 cents - adding a section "Linux in the enterprise" or something similar with appropriate topics would help selling some group subscriptions.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 12:01 UTC (Thu) by karim (subscriber, #114) [Link]

Many LWN readers are active in some form of social media or another. Yet, LWN does not have any form of integration with any of the mainstream social networks on which its readership is present, namely Google+ and Twitter. It might serve visibility to integrate in some way, shape or form with such networks and enable readership to help "get the word out".

try @lwnnet on twitter...

Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:40 UTC (Thu) by DG (subscriber, #16978) [Link]

try @lwnnet on twitter...

Posted Aug 4, 2016 14:37 UTC (Thu) by miahfost (subscriber, #51602) [Link]

I think the Twitter account should be more active, post more frequently.

Criticism from HN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 12:19 UTC (Thu) by codewiz (subscriber, #63050) [Link]

There's a thread on Hacker News on this article.

There are a quite a few comments criticizing LWN's old-school design, which at first may seem a bit surprising, coming from a website with the looks of HN, but they have a few good points on comments:

Compare LWN and Hacker News. Both are very simple, but the comment section of Hacker News has an emphasis on content, and metadata is showed in a very simple and toned down way. ("7 minutes ago" vs TIMESTAMP). On LWN there is unnecessary and redundant metadata accentuated!

And another one:

Let's look at the article's comments. It is so hard to actually follow the conversation between the users. The article's title is repeated multiple times and has a red background. Underneath each comment's title is a full-height line with a font stating the UTC timestamp, and in the next line we can finally read the actual comment.

I'll add my own personal note on usability: having to type HTML markup when posting comments feels clumsy and unnecessarily hard. Nowadays, everyone's using Markdown and it there's a wide choice of parsers for all languages. I'd actually suggest removing the plaintext and HTML formatting options altogether. And in the spirit of HN minimalism, I'd also go ahead and remove comment titles, which are rarely edited to describe the post and always contribute to clutter.

Criticism from HN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:31 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

> having to type HTML markup when posting comments feels clumsy and unnecessarily hard.

Writing a comment in plain text is nice and convenient, but I find it mildly irritating when I decide halfway through to insert a link or a bit of formatting, so I have to switch it to HTML and then go back and <p> over it all, and I still haven't figured out the right way to get that purple quoted-text style in HTML. Some variant of Markdown would help there, since it avoids the sharp transition from plain-text to plain-text-plus-a-bit-of-formatting.

> I'd also go ahead and remove comment titles, which are rarely edited to describe the post and always contribute to clutter.

I feel they're slightly more useful in the "unread comments" view, which displays the comments outside their normal threaded context, since people edit the titles frequently enough to help distinguish sub-threads (particularly useful in articles that mention systemd and therefore have hundreds of comments). But when reading a whole article the sub-threads are visible through indentation, and the comment titles do seem to change infrequently enough that they're pretty useless.

Maybe the article comments view could omit the title bar (and replace it with a more subtle comment divider), *if* it's equal to the previous-in-tree-order comment's title; but still display it if someone explicitly edits the title to indicate a new sub-thread. Or maybe that kind of inconsistency would be a terrible idea, I'm certainly not a competent designer...

> they have a few good points on comments

Incidentally, if they're basing that on this particular article, I think this article is actually kind of a worst-case demonstration - lots of short repetitive technical-content-free comments with very little nesting, which significantly worsens the content-to-metadata ratio. It works better with technical articles where people tend to write much longer comments, and I'm happy for LWN to focus on optimising for those instead.

Criticism from HN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 20:27 UTC (Thu) by ABCD (subscriber, #53650) [Link]

Writing a comment in plain text is nice and convenient, but I find it mildly irritating when I decide halfway through to insert a link or a bit of formatting, so I have to switch it to HTML and then go back and <p> over it all, and I still haven't figured out the right way to get that purple quoted-text style in HTML. Some variant of Markdown would help there, since it avoids the sharp transition from plain-text to plain-text-plus-a-bit-of-formatting.

To get the purple quoted-text style when entering text in HTML, you need to use <font class="QuotedText">...</font> (Note that <span> is disallowed in LWN comments, even though that would normally be the correct method).

old-school is better

Posted Aug 4, 2016 17:45 UTC (Thu) by lacos (subscriber, #70616) [Link]

> ("7 minutes ago" vs TIMESTAMP)

Relative timestamps in discussions (and on bug tracker comments) are the plague. For one, you can't sensibly copy & paste such timestamps. "7 minutes ago", relative to when? Doesn't make sense in any other context.

old-school is better

Posted Aug 4, 2016 23:35 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

And also, absolute timestamps can be used in cached, pre-rendered HTML pages. Instead of forcing the need to generate a comment page every time it is loaded, comment pages can be generated whenever a new comment is added.

I don't know if LWN does that but it is an advantage.

old-school is better

Posted Aug 5, 2016 12:28 UTC (Fri) by Creideiki (subscriber, #38747) [Link]

My experience is that nowadays the cache problem is handled by sending an absolute timestamp in the HTML, and then letting the browser run JavaScript to replace it with a relative time.

old-school is better

Posted Aug 6, 2016 1:28 UTC (Sat) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]

HTML itself has the <time> element[1], which was supposed to make everyone happy in this situation: in theory the author only has to mark up the displayed time with it, putting an ISO8601-formatted timestamp in an attribute if the text isn't already, and then the browser will magically render it in the user's preferred format/timezone without need for individual Javascript on the billions of webpages that need to display dates.

Just waiting on that last part to become reality... :(

[1]:https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the...

old-school is better

Posted Aug 18, 2016 12:05 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link]

This is exactly what I like in LWN comments: informative, on topic; Thank you for the example.

Personnally, I would really some way to tag the comments, complements, contributions, discussions.
In a positive way I mean, like: here is some work for the aimless browser programmer.

I would love to see the information in comments (or articles) seed further than in a few brief instants.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:27 UTC (Thu) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> (long-time readers will remember the desktop page, or the once-interesting "Linux in the News" page)

I'm young enough of a reader to only remember "Letters to the editor" section :)

Good luck to Nate and long live LWN :)

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:45 UTC (Thu) by DoofusOfDeath (guest, #110164) [Link]

Hey Jonathan,

Would you consider tweaking the definition of the "starving hacker" level? I'm sure some people don't meet the level's requirements, and yet cannot afford / justify a more expensive membership at the moment.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:48 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]

Thank you Nate!

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:49 UTC (Thu) by bjourne (guest, #99019) [Link]

Renewed! Maybe you can make it possible to subscribe for 24 or even 36 months, because you can forget to renew when your old subscription runs out? I think you guys are doing great work, and I know you're not getting paid enough for it.

Longer-term subscriptions

Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:58 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Unfortunately, our deal with the credit-card processor doesn't allow us to sell subscriptions more than one year in advance. They're afraid we'll take the money and flee to North Korea or something, leaving them on the hook.

Longer Term Subscriptions

Posted Aug 6, 2016 4:18 UTC (Sat) by dfa (✭ supporter ✭, #6767) [Link]

As a very long time subscriber and lurker, my strategy is to opt for the shorter option, so as to avoid automatic discount !

I second Virtex, "name your price" as a (bi)annual promotion, new subscriptions, sure, but I hope also an opportunity for some of us to up our level, too !

Smooth Sailing, Nate ! And continuing thanks to our Grumpy Editor !

Longer-term subscriptions

Posted Aug 7, 2016 0:40 UTC (Sun) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link]

"They're afraid we'll take the money and flee to North Korea or something"

To be honest mate, I suspect that your own Govt are far more afraid of you lot pissing off to $somewhere_else_that _is_not_the_us.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 14:39 UTC (Thu) by adobriyan (subscriber, #30858) [Link]

Subscriptions are in decline because of a lack of graphical emoticons.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 14:49 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

You mean, things like this ?
😇 🤔 😐 😑 😶 🙄 😏 😣 😥 😮 🤐 😯 😪 😫 😴 😌 🤓

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 17:26 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Hmm.. Mine seems to have them.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 19:26 UTC (Thu) by adobriyan (subscriber, #30858) [Link]

My condolences.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 22:09 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

So, that was an instance of Poe's law?
I'm getting rather confused.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 15:02 UTC (Thu) by virtex (subscriber, #3019) [Link]

It might be an interesting experiment to try a "name your price" promotion for a 12 month subscription. If it's well publicized I can see this drawing in a good number of new subscribers, even if a lot of them are only paying $1 for a year's subscription. The real magic happens at the end of the 12 month period when it's time for them to renew. Many will drop, but I suspect there will be others who will see the value in maintaining that subscription and pay to keep their subscription.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 16:12 UTC (Thu) by jlargentaye (subscriber, #75206) [Link]

Thanks Nate, you have been an great contribution to LWN over the years. I look forward to reading about your font work (even if written by someone else) :)

As has been pointed out in the HN comments [1], LWN lacks a easy-to-find (not to say prominent) "Subscribe" button or link in places like this. It should at least be present in the sidebar for unsubscribed readers.

It could be worth even adding a link within the article.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224408

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 16:41 UTC (Thu) by fratti (guest, #105722) [Link]

A few things in terms of content I'd definitely welcome are more in-depth articles about developments in userspace applications, not just the kernel. I love those technical articles, and I'm quite positive there are a number of userspace projects which are active and complex enough to allow for interesting articles too. A few examples come to mind:
  • kwin, which Martin Gräßlin writes about often on his blog, appears to often be faced with interesting design issues. Perhaps Martin would even be willing to write a one-off for LWN.
  • Krita is quite an active project and has to deal with tablet drivers on three different operating systems, and I've seen their devs post some interesting insights on their blog before.
  • mpv is a video player with very competent developers which understand their field well and are often faced with difficult problems they need to solve.
  • FFmpeg is probably the most popular audio/video library on the planet, and I've seen some of their developers post in-depth notes about video compression formats they were reverse-engineering before.
Additionally, a new section could be added, focusing on covering one specific somewhat-recent Linux software that might not just provide for an interesting read, but can also use the feedback generated from LWN's knowledgeable readerbase to improve their software. Unlike other "tech press" articles, the articles for this feature could be way more technical, getting down and dirty with the nitty gritty technical details of hard implementation problems.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 20:16 UTC (Thu) by dany (guest, #18902) [Link]

I agree. I rememmber Ulrich Drepper's articles about what every programmer should know about memory. It was so good series....

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 5, 2016 7:55 UTC (Fri) by ctreb (subscriber, #4406) [Link]

Gonna "me too" this one. I nearly cried when the aforementioned desktop page disappeared. I only stayed due to the ridiculously good quality of the publication. (or did I resubscribe then... don't remember)
The trial and tribulations of the people making the part of linux that is in my face and easily accessible did fascinate me at the time. I suspect that this accessibility may attract a few more readers that are less interested in kernel plumbing and systemd flamewars. Bring back the desktop flamewars!? :)

Oh, and good luck Nate. Thanks for all the good stuff you did.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 15, 2016 8:05 UTC (Mon) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

+1 from me, I think this kind of stuff would be useful. I usually skim the kernel page because I am not a kernel developer and have no intention of being one. But deep looks at how the common open source applications we use are designed would be interesting.

As for LWN in general, haven't currently renewed because frankly I'm drowning in reading material and trying to weigh the relative relevance of it. I do think LWN does good work and will likely renew at some point.

And I want to see more Grumpy Editor articles, especially a continuation of the series on finance/accounting apps that seemed to get stalled.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 4, 2016 21:41 UTC (Thu) by markrose (guest, #110309) [Link]

I'm a new subscriber as a result of this post. I have two comments:

1. There should be a subscribe link in the left-hand column. There isn't anything obvious telling me that subscribers are wanted.
2. The benefits of subscribing should be shown before making an account.

I've enjoyed LWN over the years. Thanks!

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 18, 2016 12:22 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link]

Welcome on-board! And thank you for the useful points too.

I wonder if I will not start a kind of "bookmarks page" for the LWN articles with useful suggestions I found since my own starting point.

Why not have a per-account "comment bookmarks" page with an easy button for eliciting them as an additional feature (subscriber-only of course :-).

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 5, 2016 6:23 UTC (Fri) by sohkamyung (guest, #75701) [Link]

I'm not sure if this will work for you, but you could consider setting up an account on Patreon [ https://www.patreon.com/ ] to offer more ways for people to support LWN.

You could, for example, set up a minimum $1 level per month for people to support you generally, followed by gradually higher tiers for people who want more content in a timely way or even special features like monthly video recordings of activities at LWN. Anything goes ... };-)

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 5, 2016 12:40 UTC (Fri) by Creideiki (subscriber, #38747) [Link]

Patreon would be my suggestion as well, both for people who cannot afford the "starving hacker" level and for people who don't want to give their credit card numbers out to yet another site. Then again, I live in a part of the Internet where Patreon is already popular, so my experience is that adding support for yet another creator is trivial. If you're not already familiar with their systems, your experience will not be as smooth.

But maybe the current reality is that there are several different, mostly non-interoperable payment systems, and people prefer to stick with the ones they're used to, so if you want to capture the maximum number of subscribers you have to accept payments in all of them. Then, it boils down to whether the subscribers you would get from yet another system is worth the expense of setting it up, which is hard to know in advance.

Other payment options

Posted Aug 5, 2016 7:21 UTC (Fri) by ber (subscriber, #2142) [Link]

Congratulations for LWN, my company is a subscriber since this became possible. Keep up the good work!

Doing some experiments are good. I agree with the notions of having more userland or desktop development or overview articles to draw in more people.

You could experiment a bit with different presentations or comment systems, but I believe this is not your core value. So when in doubt: let things be. For instance I like the way I can do simple HTML markup insead of learning another markup-language-of-the-day. The feature that are highest on my list would be a nice to have an edit possibility to correct typos or links. (Just keep the old version a link away.)

In addition I suggest to add more volunteer payment options. Personally I would recommend flattr and bitcoins. Flattr because their "subscribe" model is very good and you can easily see which articles really hit high emotions by also attaching it to single articles. Bitcoins allows for anonymous payments and while there are a number of technical and ethical issues with it, bitcoins probably are the most widespread solution.

Best Regards,
Bernhard

Comment notifications

Posted Aug 5, 2016 17:50 UTC (Fri) by alvieboy (guest, #51617) [Link]

Comment notifications would be a nice feature on LWN, ideally sent by email. It's sometimes hard to track if we got a response when dealing with large, Poettering-bould-like threads.

Alvie

Comment notifications

Posted Aug 5, 2016 17:53 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

LWN has had email notifications for years; is there some aspect of the feature that isn't working the way you would like?

Thanks a lot, Nathan

Posted Aug 5, 2016 20:15 UTC (Fri) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]

... and all the best for your future!

While I'm here, my most desirable LWN site enhancement would be collapsible comment subthreads, or maybe a quick link to take you back to the parent comment. Sometimes it'd nice to be able just to ignore the noisy digressions that go on for multiple screenfuls. Maybe just as a slight enhancement of the hide-comment-from-blacklisted-poster feature.

Front page layout

Posted Aug 9, 2016 13:05 UTC (Tue) by Dead2 (guest, #102855) [Link]

I am a subscriber, but I happen to prefer the non-subscriber split frontpage where bigger articles are on the left and shorter/simpler news are on the right. Unfortunately I have not found any way to enable this in the customization page.

Is there already some way of enabling this, or will there be? It is of course not a big deal, but I find it makes the frontpage easier to use when just having a semi-quick look and then later taking the time to actually read some of the big articles.

Keep up the great work :)

Front page layout

Posted Aug 9, 2016 13:12 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

I think that if you bookmark https://lwn.net/Articles/FrontPage you'll get the presentation you want.

Front page layout

Posted Aug 9, 2016 13:14 UTC (Tue) by Dead2 (guest, #102855) [Link]

Ah, clever, but not very intuitive :)

Thanks though, that is replacing my current bookmark.

Front page layout

Posted Aug 16, 2016 15:01 UTC (Tue) by mbolivar (subscriber, #75534) [Link]

Useful link indeed, but I do agree that changing the default presentation of the website when logged in in a way that changes the number of articles visible on a single screen is an unfortunate decision, and one that I found disruptive as well.

Thanks for the link.

Change of format? How about literally changing format? :)

Posted Aug 18, 2016 19:27 UTC (Thu) by josteink (guest, #110364) [Link]

As a new subscriber, I would love to be able to get the weekly edition in EPUB or MOBI, so that I could easily read it on my Kindle or other ebook reader. It's just so much more comfortable to read on.

Of course I might be able to create a script of sorts which somewhat reliably reworked your HTML to be ebook-conversion-friendly, but it would probably be simpler and better if you provided the MOBI/EPUB directly for download.

How about it? Anyone else think this is a good idea?

Change of format? How about literally changing format? :)

Posted Aug 18, 2016 20:15 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

That would be useful. Right now I'm going to Archives → One big page and use send2kindle Chrome addon every week.

Change of format? How about literally changing format? :)

Posted Aug 18, 2016 20:32 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

We actually had a proof-of-concept epub generator at one point, but the project never got finished out. I agree it would be a great thing to have; I'll see if we can't get that done.

Change of format? How about literally changing format? :)

Posted Aug 18, 2016 20:56 UTC (Thu) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

The most excellent Calibre contains functionality for downloading news (basically web pages) and converting them to EPUB. That functionality contains items both for regular LWN as well as the weekly edition ("Fetch news" → "English" → "LWN…"). You'll have to enter your login data and then it should be able to retrieve the weekly edition.

You can even automate that process if I'm not mistaken.

(Note that I haven't used Calibre's LWN news source myself yet. But that shouldn't deter you from giving it a try.)

Change of format? How about literally changing format? :)

Posted Aug 18, 2016 21:36 UTC (Thu) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]

Something else that may be of interest is Robie Basak's lwn2email.py: https://github.com/basak/lwn2email

I haven't tried it, but it will email a weekly edition to a Kindle (and, perhaps, other devices).

Getting back to the epub support is on our list as Jon mentioned.

jake

Change of format? How about literally changing format? :)

Posted Aug 19, 2016 19:44 UTC (Fri) by josteink (guest, #110364) [Link]

Thanks for the suggestion! That's certainly better than nothing, and simpler than what I would have cooked up.

I'll keep that in a crontab until you guys have something proper set up.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 18, 2016 20:37 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

I think that LWN should be updated to make it easy to read on an iPad: in Chrome when I zoom on the text, the left column becomes big too.
This is an annoying behaviour which can turn off readers.

Some news from LWN

Posted Aug 26, 2016 20:16 UTC (Fri) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]

I just extended my subscription, changing it to project manager level.
2 observations:
LWN doesn't seem to have raised prices since at least 2010, which is amazing, but perhaps overdue :-).

I tried to find out during (and after) the renwewal whar features are available on a project manager level but failed to find out. Perhaps that should be easier to find when one changes his subscription level.


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