Tag Archives: OSNews

User Generated Content Usually Sucks

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This goes to show how worthless digg.com comments can be. Nearly every comment is dugg down. C’mon, are these the kinds of comments that people feel they should take the time to type and submit. Do they think other people will get joy from reading them?

Read this comments on this inane, embarassing mess. Folks, this is proof that user generated content is not necessarily anything more than just volume. So is this, by the way.

Sites like Slashdot and OSNews are mostly valuable because their users contribute so much quality in the comments. Slashdot has been better since I moved my threshold to +3. OSNews is pretty good at 0. But most sites that make it too easy to participate are complete crap.

OSNews v4 Logic

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I was playing with an outlines of OSNews version 4 today. I have started sketching out some ideas that I intend to implement geared at making the site more consistent, easier to use, less complex, and less heavy from a code standpoint.

One of the major areas to improve is commenting. I am going to change the way threading works almost entirely.

First off, comments below your threshold will not disappear anymore. They will simply be collapsed and greyed out. Yes, this is a bit digg-ish, but we had to implement a lot of complex code in order to compensate for parent comments that were below threshold. So unless a comment is administratively hidden, they will show and be un-collapsable via Javascript (I don’t know if it will be AJAX or just Javascript div swapping). I think this is a better solution than we have today.

Secondly, moderation will definitely be AJAX-based.

Thirdly, I haven’t “cleared” this with David, but I think flat comments will be hard coded to view all in one page. It’s so much easier on the database to use a single, easy light query than to force several page loads and hit the db over and over.

Next, the comment template will be unified. Currently, there is a flat template, a threaded template, an admin flat template, an admin threaded template, and a reply template. I’m going to fix this nonsense.

In the process, I will clean up commenting. Comments use a ridiculous chain of includes just to produce a comment. This is the effect of hacked feature upon hacked feature of v3, and v4 will fix this.

Other changes: the user page will be streamlined to display user information as well as provide a base for recommendations, etc. Currently, it’s trying to be too many things.

Lastly, I intend to clean up the URLs. While preserving all valid links, I want the URLs to be prettier and not have file extensions. Jobs.OSNews is a good example of what I’d like to see via the URL.

Anyway, if you have thoughts about features, etc you’d like to see, feel free to leave a comment.

Reaction to Recent OSNews Pieces

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I missed the hoopla over the last week stemming from Thom Holwerda’s piece on OSNews called Has the Desktop Linux Bubble Burst? His follow up piece, entitled On Favouritism, Apologies, and Black Helicopters, which sounds like the personal musings of a short story author, attempted to clarify his points.

I have a lot to say on this, so if you’re interested, read on for the meat.
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Christmas Roundup 2006

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Well, I’m back from New Orleans. Christmas was a blast, and I got *a lot* of great stuff, but most notably, my lovely wife kept her eyes open and secured me a Nintendo Wii. I was so psyched to play it, and I am actually sore from it right now, no kidding.

The thing about the Wii is this: it’s really really FUN. It’s so different from playing a game while sitting down. Playing the games, moving around, designing a Mii — even watching other people play it is fun. It’s just fun. There’s no better word.

New Orleans is… well… what I expected. Much of the city is mostly back to normal, although traffic is crazy on the West Bank since much of the eastern part of the city is honestly unchanged since Katrina. It’s pretty amazing and eye-opening to see parts of the city worse off today than they were a year ago. Parts of the city are literally abandoned.

It was also great to see the in-laws. They once again received us openly and we had a great, relaxing time. They fed us well, kept us warm, and gave us another great Christmas.

I also missed quite an active week at OSNews, where Thom was able to anger Aaron Siego of KDE fame, and then backtrack a bit to clarify. I find myself often disagreeing with Thom, sometimes infuriatingly so (esp. with regard to his hard line politics and his anti-Isreal views). This time, I once again disagree with him. But what makes the world go round and the reason I haven’t slammed down my hands and flat out quit OSNews is because Thom at least has the guts to say what he thinks. The discussion is generally worthwhile. And though the criticisms that Thom uses OSNews like his own blog and that the staff is generally uninformed and unskilled is often tossed around, what appears on OSNews is much better than the tech alternatives, which is almost exclusively recycled and rehashed link soup. Slashdot rarely features originals, and digg *never* does. At least OSNews gets people talking. And although you may not agree with Thom’s or Eugenia’s viewpoint, there is always good conversation. I’m going to pick up the specifics of the article in my next entry.

New OSNews Project

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I’ve been off the radar with firsttube.com this last week, mostly because my free time was spent working on a new project for OSNews. I hope we’re going to roll it out after Thanksgiving, but it’s definitely the nicest code I’ve written thus far and probably the nicest site. A lot of what I wrote here is going to influence the way we move with OSN4.

In the meantime, this new project is hopefully going to be launched in the next week or two and I’m hoping it makes a splash. In the meantime, I need a few beta testers to provide some feedback. If you’d like to help test a new site we’ve been working on, please post a comment below and I can explain what to do.

Planning OSNews Version 4

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So we’re really beginning to talk about the next iteration of OSNews. There are several things we’re talking about right now, but since I’ve gotten a lot of web experience since the coding of OSNews 3, written several new and powerful web applications, and since we’ve, since rollout introduced several new features and several new optimizations, including multiple caching techniques, I’ve been trying to decide whether it’s best to just fool with the interface, or whether I want to actually rewrite parts of the front and backend. I’ve written lots of apps for work – some are completely AJAX based, some don’t use Javascript at all. Some are completely object-oriented, some are procedural. Some are very tied to MySQL, some use Microsoft SQL Server.

There are definitely ways to continue to optimize OSNews, but it would require some major changes. I’m not sure I’m up for that, and it would also mean changes to the mobile site. That said, I think the smartest thing to do is to do some rewriting.

I told David today that I have some requirements – yes, requirements, if *I’m* going to be coding OSN4. At the top of the list is reliance on CSS for the majority of layout and liberal use of javascript for the UI. I want freedom to go for the whole kit and kaboodle — AJAX (where it makes sense) and javascript in many places to accomplish what we can on the client side. Things like moderation should not require a page load – or two, as it currently is.

I love our claim that we render everywhere, it’s unique and we are probably one of the best sites on the net for mobile use. But I’m so over coding in HTML 3. It took me less than an hour to get threading working properly on this site. It took me days to plan and code it on OSN.

So, as I approach the run for OSN4, I’m thinking of what we ought to be implementing and the best way to do it. We’re going to do some slimming – we’re probably give up themes initially. We’ll probably give up multi-mode comments: you’ll get to choose between flat mode (all comments, in order) and expanded threaded. We’ll probably scale back some features, but expand others.

Either way, it’s sure to be an adventure as we get there.

PHP Lesson 2: Behind the Scenes of Threading

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This is going to be a very nerdy post, because I’m going to get into some actual PHP code. I’ve been thinking a lot about efficient threading. The implementation of threading on OSNews is very complex, because it involves lots of math in order to properly construct and align tables. Furthermore, because we don’t use CSS for positioning, it’s accomplished via ‘align’ commands and TWO templates, which is really clumsy, because between flat mode, admin mode, collapsed threading mode, and expanded threaded mode, we have several templates, and since they are all independent, they tend to unintentionally vary, so you might see different things in replies and threads. My goal in writing a threaded display for firsttube.com was to avoid all of the pitfalls in that implementation and come up with something clean. Read on for the gory details.
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firsttube.com gets threads

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I understand that some people believe that threading comments are unintuitive, they confuse the user, and that they are ugly. I like ‘em. So this site now supports threading in the comments.

Now – as of right now, you can only reply once, like digg, but it supports two deep. This is only because I haven’t found a more elegant way to allow deeper threading in the code. As soon as I do, I will be allowing deeper threading, probably 3 or 4 comments deep for aesthetic reasons.

The entire thing is done in CSS, unlike OSNews which is hard coded to the pixel with very complex code that really makes me uncomfortable when I see it. This is much nicer. It’s all done via templates, and there are only two – one for comments and one for threads, and this will probably change to one soon too.

What Is Your Blog Worth?

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Unfortunately, my blog is currently worth a measly five hundred sixty-something dollars. OSNews, on the other hand, is apparently worth over $800,000 as of right now. Gnomefiles is worth 98 grand. Slashdot is over 11 million bucks, digg 19.1 million. YouTube is only worth 246 million, but MySpace is worth 1.5 billion – with a “b.”

Take these with a grain of salt – I wouldn’t sell my website for 560 dollars; obviously, YouTube was purchased for over 1.5 billion; and I would be very surprised if anyone would actually offer 800,000 dollars for OSNews.

You can check the value of your blog too.


My blog is worth $564.54.
How much is your blog worth?