61–70 of 152 posts
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…
There is no "Subscribe" link anywhere in the text of this article or on the web page that hosts it ( http://lwn.net/Articles/696017/ ). I was able to find the link from the front page, but it's kind of hidden -- https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info which says "Get started! The first step is to log into LWN. If you do not yet have an account, please create one now; otherwise, please log in to continue:". Which seems like a…
There's nothing wrong with informing people that you can subscribe! A small Call To Action at the end of every post (Do you like this post? Help support us and get future content directly to your inbox by subscribing) would already do wonders! And having "Subscribe" in the sidebar. (If anyone from LWN is reading: use those words verbatim if you wish)
There's no shame in this being a paid publication. Considering the anti-advertising demographic, many would be glad to help support an ad-free system.
* 6 x LWN.net Weekly Edition for $DATE
* A few weekly security advisories
* "Some news from LWN"
* Statistics from the 4.7 development cycle
* New software releases
None of these interest me. Here's what does:
* Klitzke: Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL
* Python's os.urandom() in the absence of entropy
* One-time passwords and GnuPG with Nitrokey
There are a few articles I like there. But they aren't discoverable and I can't find what I want without working to filter the noise.
Contrast this with hackaday.com, where every article is a really interesting feature, there's no news on bugfix releases or kernel changelogs, and they mix feature news, cool stuff in the store, and community projects.
Okay, let's fix this, here are some suggestions they could think about: - Improve the design a bit. Carefully, you do not want to piss of old subscribers. - Improve the conversion rate. There is a middle ground between newsletter modals and burying the method to subscribe. - Introduce a few new products. As far as I can see, at the moment it is just "in depth news for OSS, especially kernel hackers". Maybe they could…
I simply tried to change the font-family to Segoe UI (or whatever your OS' font) in Developer Tools, and it looks more interesting than Times New Roman
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> 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). Say what? On the contrary, I think that it's splendidly simple to read LWN, because there's no distraction. It's a good, clean site; it respects the styling I instruct my browser to apply to it; it displays just fine in links, l…
Also, things that should be rock solid and dirt simple by now have actually gotten more fragile over time. Heck, just look what happened when the parent tried to write the current year, after successfully expressing an older two decade range ;) 2016 was a total mistake. Let's just revert, and then wait for 2020-LTS.
Argh, I blame an unfamiliar keyboard. And being half-asleep. Sigh
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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! Everything on HN is clearly thought out, and almost nothing on LWN is.
Some of us vastly prefer a time stamp to an utterly useless relative measurement displayed.
"N minutes ago" is compact and does not require any client-side JS to provide an unambiguous value.
At least LWN includes the timezone, which is a step ahead of most of the sites I've used.
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…
You're right the LWN site is utter trash. It's 2016, why aren't they embarrassed of their own incompetence? What comes next? Are they going to tell me to read a book?
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> 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…