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Some news from LWN

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Re: Some news from LWN

#31

Post by Retr0spectrum »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #11
espadrine wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be honest: if you had not written this comment, would you have subscribed in six months if they started looking like Medium 2.0?

The complaints in this thread are mostly things like spacing and broken layouts, not fancy web X.0 fads. Hacker News is stylistically simple, but they still pay attention to making the content readable without strain.

HN style is very functional and practical, but I wouldn't describe it as "readable without strain".

The poor text contrast in many places makes it borderline unreadable, text posts in particular.

My second complaint would be that line lengths are often too long to be easily readable.

Re: Some news from LWN

#32

Post by jasonkester »

One minor idea. If you're an organization defined by a mystery three letter acronym, do people a favor and define it somewhere. Since it's not in this post or on the lwn.net homepage, here's the LWN faq:

http://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn

Notice that it's seven printed pages full of questions that somebody familiar with the thing might want to know. But nowhere does it tell you what "LWN" stands for.

If you want people to subscribe to your thing, step one should be to tell us what it is.

Re: Some news from LWN

#33

Post by BigDaddyD »

jasonkester wrote: post #32

One minor idea. If you're an organization defined by a mystery three letter acronym, do people a favor and define it somewhere. Since it's not in this post or on the lwn.net homepage, here's the LWN faq: http://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn Notice that it's seven printed pages full of questions that somebody familiar with the thing might want to know. But nowhere does it tell you what "LWN" stands for. If you want people to sub…

So what does it mean?

Re: Some news from LWN

#34

Post by nl »

BigDaddyD wrote: post #33
jasonkester wrote: post #32

One minor idea. If you're an organization defined by a mystery three letter acronym, do people a favor and define it somewhere. Since it's not in this post or on the lwn.net homepage, here's the LWN faq: http://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn Notice that it's seven printed pages full of questions that somebody familiar with the thing might want to know. But nowhere does it tell you what "LWN" stands for. If you want people to sub…

So what does it mean?

"Linux Weekly News"

Re: Some news from LWN

#35

Post by iokanuon »

jasonkester wrote: post #32

One minor idea. If you're an organization defined by a mystery three letter acronym, do people a favor and define it somewhere. Since it's not in this post or on the lwn.net homepage, here's the LWN faq: http://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn Notice that it's seven printed pages full of questions that somebody familiar with the thing might want to know. But nowhere does it tell you what "LWN" stands for. If you want people to sub…

>The acronym "LWN" originally stood for Linux Weekly News; that name is no longer used because the site no longer covers exclusively Linux-related topics, and it has daily as well as weekly content.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LWN.net

Re: Some news from LWN

#36

Post by cdesai »

jasonkester wrote: post #32

One minor idea. If you're an organization defined by a mystery three letter acronym, do people a favor and define it somewhere. Since it's not in this post or on the lwn.net homepage, here's the LWN faq: http://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn Notice that it's seven printed pages full of questions that somebody familiar with the thing might want to know. But nowhere does it tell you what "LWN" stands for. If you want people to sub…

It actually does tell you.

"What does LWN stand for, anyway? LWN, initially, was "Linux Weekly News." That name has been deemphasized over time as we have moved beyond just the weekly coverage, and as we have looked at the free software community as a whole. We have yet to come up with a better meaning for LWN, however."

Re: Some news from LWN

#37

Post by sotojuan »

paganel wrote: post #19
bflesch wrote: post #4

I've never been a subscriber of this page and I don't think I am their real target audience. But I'm a professional programmer and I have been using Linux for around 15 years. I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the s…

> Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the site's UX at all. For me that's a feature, not a bug. I'm interested about the content itself, not about with what color or what font that content is presented as.

Every time someone says a website should update their look people think they mean it should look like Medium and be brigaded by design school freshmen who'll make the page weigh 900gb.

I don't know what the original commenter meant, but the text could be a bit bigger and the line lengths and spacing controlled.

The comment metadata could be shortened and humanized, though the audience may find it useful.

There's some bugs with the dropdowns on mobile (haven't been able to close one).

I don't know if that will get them subscriptions, but it'd make the site easier to read.

Ironically, if you look at the HTML classes, they are using a CSS library typically used to make "modern" sites many here revile: http://purecss.io/

Re: Some news from LWN

#38

Post by mihok »

I'm somewhat a new reader in the past couple years to LWN and actually was thinking about subscribing just a couple weeks ago. In honesty, I didn't even realize LWN had subscriptions until recently.

Either way, I've gone ahead and paid for the year up front, please keep going, I thoroughly enjoy the articles!

Re: Some news from LWN

#39

Post by eumoria »

bflesch wrote: post #4

I've never been a subscriber of this page and I don't think I am their real target audience. But I'm a professional programmer and I have been using Linux for around 15 years. I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the s…

Interesting backlash on this comment considering the issue in the post of subscriber drops. Not saying this is the case but younger readers who may be extremely interested in the sites content visit or are linked to the page and quickly leave because it looks like it hasn't been touched since 2000 (outside the content). I don't personally view any annoying layout issues but I believe this is a valid (if small) point.

Re: Some news from LWN

#40

Post by pluma »

hueving wrote: post #30
pluma wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the design is objectively bad. The article's title is repeated throughout the comments list and emphasized. The other comment metadata has the same visual emphasis as the actual comments (except the link and author jump out more than the comment itself). The articles themselves expand to the full width of the window.

I think you mean subjectively. "it's not in the format I'm accustomed to" is not objective in any way.

No, objectively. Unless you're saying it's intended to emphasize the metadata over the content. I'm talking about factors that are measurably detrimental to readability -- not fashion. Visual emphasis isn't new, it's been around for centuries -- it's not just a fad.

There is plenty of introductory material on visual emphasis around, not just covering emphasis in textual media, e.g.: http://daphne.palomar.edu/design/emphasis.html

I agree that line length according to more recent studies seems to be less consistent (some recent studies say speed actually increases with longer lines but there doesn't seem to be any data on comprehension/retention and preference seems to be biased towards shorter lines -- again all of these factors may be cultural). But visual emphasis is a thing -- it's hard-wired into how human visual perception works.

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