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Slashdot Updates 114

Posted by CmdrTaco from the fun-and-games-at-BSI dept.
Well I guess this is todays changelog: First, my space heater is busted so I can't feal my fingers very well. Second, "Light" and "No Icon" options are in the user preferences. Combined with with "No Boxes" and setting your mode to NoComment, you should have a Slashdot that will work on extremely minimal browsers. Comments probably will still die in light mode (and still require a table) but I'll work that out later. Hit the link to read about changes to various Slashboxes.
We added several boxes including Weather24 Happy Penguin, Frag.com, MetaCrawler, IMDB (Updated to include this weeks releases) LinuxHQ (gets current kernel versions) MozillaZine, Userland, BeOS Central and x86.org. Several other boxes were updated, fixed or modified. We've got a large handful left to do, but most of them don't have public backends. If you know of cool sites with public backends, let us know. I've got almost all the sites I desire hugely except gnome.org and aint-it-cool-news.

I still have a bit more I want to do with the customization stuff. Mainly I'd like the ability to snarf RDF pages, and allow users to publish their own User Space blocks if they have some interesting content worth sharing with other readers.

After that, the moderation system is getting an overhaul. We're going to offer an experimental new system that will allow any registered user to participate (the old system will remain unchanged for the die hards, so no fear).

We've had 7500 new accounts created in the last couple days. Almost 5000 of them are using the new config stuff. I'm pretty pleased with that. And after the massive overload yesterday, the server has returned to a reasonable load. We are getting 2 more servers and will start distributing the load soon. That'll help even more, but I bet our existing setup could handle 600,000-700,000 pages a day without really blinking. We'll see how much we grow.

I cleaned up a lot of nasty old code today. I probably caused a few nasty new bugs in the process. If anything funky goes down, lemme know. Particularly with comment display and browsing.

Lastly, Richard Thieme's beta test went well. He'll be taking next week off, and then be posting regular columns each thursday for awhile. We'll see how that goes. I think it'll be pretty cool.

Unrelated:I bought another guitar yesterday. Its a 12 string acoustic fender with a damaged case so I got a ridiculously good deal. Having never owned either an acoustic guitar, or a 12 string, I'm quite enchanted with it. Twice as many strings means rob can suck with fuller sound.
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  • So what about using daily update content handlers for box content? While RDF and public backends are definitely best, methinks that daily update does what you want to do for non-public backend sites (i.e., snarf the content and just the content)
  • 12 stringers are very very sweet... good luck with it. =)
  • No doubt. 12-strings rock, and it's a Fender to boot? Color me jealous. Rock on, M-dog.

  • You rock Rob...

    If there's anyway we can help, let us know!
  • Hey, Rob - 'bout a year ago (maybe less) I mailed you asking about a Palm Pilot version of Slashdot, to use with AvantGo or some of the other offline readers for the palm pilot - maybe your lite+noicon version would work well for that, but I don't want my basic profile to be lite+noicon. How 'bout a www.slashdot.org/ultralite URL that defaults to no icons, no boxes, no comments, etc? Something that would format decently on the Pilot? Actually, AvantGo *can* handle images, so the icons might be kinda neat... depending on the formatting. Would probably need smaller icons. Thanks! /. is looking spiffy these days!
  • Hang on! Shouldn't the /. server's heatsinks keep the room warm enough? Failing that, add a resistor or two on the network cabling (ummm... maybe that 's not such a bright idea :)
  • is there any way to have a indication of the new poll on the main page with no icons and no boxes. today's was an exception as the poll was mentioned in an article, so i found it by following the past polls, but in general that won't work. am i missing something in the preferences.

    rob, how about an icon for new polls

    lytles
  • well, obviously you rob, so thanks, but your last note said thanks to the new server, i think it came from var but i am not sure, guess i would like to send them a thank you too.
  • It would be really nice if users.pl could not only list the comments I recently posted, but also the # of replies (or may be even the replies themselves) for those comments.
  • You lose a space heater, and suddenly your fingers don't work? And how far south are you?

    Try that on this (North) side of the 49th parallel, man. :^)

  • Posted by !ErrorBookmarkNotDefined:

    After reading the README.linux that should have come with that space heater, just vi /etc/spacehtr.conf and find the line that reads: space_heat at 2 days and edit that to read: space_heat at now Then, just type: insmod spcheat.o spaceheat and it should be working. Heh. I don't even have some gloves to send you, so bad humor will have to do. :)

    -----------------------------
    Computers are useless. They can only give answers.
  • Sure all he has to do is start overclocking CPUs and video cards!

    Paul.

  • Ditto.

    :)

    OK, I do have a bit more to say. Slashdot without user comments isn't nearly as much fun, yet obviously, Palm Pilots and their ilk can't take much (even with compression).

    With the new user rating systems, perhaps we could take

    1. A light version of the Slashdot content, consisting of the main page as we now know it, and all "Read More" links (don't worry about other links; AvantGo can block all off-site links and I would hope any competitors could too, so that won't bloat the system).

    2. On those Read More pages, give A: the whole story and B: The top 10 (or whatever) user-rated comments.

    After the user rating system goes in, this shouldn't take "much work". There are probably about a 100 things that wouldn't take "much work", but, still, this would be really, really cool. I'd offer to help if I knew anything about Perl... do you take offers of assistance?

    Anyhow, from the user's side, we'd take http://www.slasdot.org/lite as our home page, and go 1 link deep.
  • Great job Rob! I dig the fact that I can order the side boxes any way I want.

    Any way I can disable the Ad banner?
    Oh, well. I guess we can't everything.

    ;-)
  • Rob, thanks for everything you have done at slashdot!
  • I want to be able to turn off the text on the left. You know,
    "faq
    hof
    code
    awards
    slashNET
    older stuff
    rob's page
    submit story
    book reviews
    user account
    ask slashdot
    advertising
    supporters
    past polls
    cachedot
    features
    topics
    about
    jobs
    BSI "
    All of those little words end up taking up SO much of the window space.
  • Ohh.. tweleve string guitars are nice.. i used to go to guitar center and play with all the pretty expensive toys i couldnt afford because i was feeding my hardware habit..

    (sorry for my lameness .. yay goofy painkillers)

  • Nice job! It's made me decide to actually use my account, after all :-)

    Is there any way to control the order in which the boxen are displayed? (e.g. I want Q3Arena news, but not as the first item at the top of the page).

    A couple other potential boxen, but I don't think they have backends:

    The Coming Attractions (http://corona.bc.ca/films/)
    Movie news site, somewhat like AICN

    The Digital Bits (http://www.thedigitalbits.com/)
    DVD news site
  • I want to add some OS/2 sites to Slashdot. What exactly is a "public backend" and how do I know if my favorite news sites have one?

    --
    Timur Tabi
    Remove "nospam_" from email address

  • You say you have a Userland Slashbox, but I don't see it.

  • Rob will definitely need a Palm version when the Palm 7 hits the market...wireless browsing...24/7 hmmmm....

    AC
  • I'm just guessing, but I suppose that this is something lke Slashdot's ultramode.txt [slashdot.org] that lets a front-end get a quick read of the headlines on the site, links to them, etc.

    I have no idea how to know if your favorite site supports this. :)

  • It's probably the '.'. Perl is probably usning it in a regex and '.' means `match any char'.
  • On the right hand side, I had (in order) Old News, the Poll and Freshmeat. I hit the up arrow on the Poll, and it moved to the bottom. I then hit the down arrow on the poll, and it moved to the very top of the list.
  • A site (such as CNN) would have also available a totally slimmed-down version of itself, containing only very basic information - top story, list of other stories... all relevant content on that page with zero fluff or design-oriented markup.

    If that 'back end' was public, Rob or anyone could just aim a script at it, suck the raw data out (really easy 'cause there's no fluff html) and parse.

    It's much more difficult to hit cnn.com's mainpage; there's like ten kilobytes of markup to wade through. Backends make life easier for the hackers.
  • How appropriate, the fortune at the bottom read:
    "When you live in a sick society, just about everything you do is wrong."

    :-)
  • Before the new customizations (which I really like... helOOOO, Jenni!), using the index_F.shtml trick, one click from the main page got me every single comment on one page.

    Even with huge numbers of posts.

    Now all I get is the "more than 100 comments, displaying index only" message, which I never got before (which I switched to flat mode to get around!).

    I want my old flat mode back! No stupid headers, just all the comments, on one page.

    --JW
    Yes, I do have bandwidth to burn, why do you ask?

  • I had the opposite problem just now - My default is flat mode (prefs page). When I click the Threaded link, I get the threaded page, but then I can't switch back to flat.

    Also Flat mode as a default makes the Poll and some other things funky.
    --
  • I got similar funky behaviour until I decided to go around my proxy. I think the proxy was hitting the URL more than once. Probably should look finding out what the miles of ap_bgets() errors in my error logs are about too at some stage.

    Note that the up and down-ness wrap. You hit up from the top and it goes to the bottom.
  • Wow. This is fun stuff. Rob: you should also add some sort of weather box. What about a stock ticker (just the basic DJA, NASDAQ, S&P etc)? How about a news site..like CNN or ABC? Doing this will allow me to completely eliminate using Netcenter (which is really nice...).

    Anyhoo, I appreciate your hard work.
  • Woohoo, now I can get my BOSC intake from more than one site....

    BTW Rob, should you get anything resembling spare time in the next couple years, could you change that to "BeOS Central" rather than "BEOSCentral"? I'm such a pedant.
  • Rob,

    Whenever I go to Slashdot now, I don't get _my_ page, I get the customised page of some other person at my ISP.

    I assume that this is because http://slashdot.org/ is being cached by my ISP's proxy server, which it _shouldn't_ because it is dynamically generated.

    I remember this happening before (sometime last year) and it was fixed somehow. I don't know what's actually involved so can someone please do something about it?

    Maybe you need a "Pragma: no-cache" or similar in the headers. Apache's mod_expires might do the trick.

    Good work with all these new enhancements.

    Andrew.

    --
    The Yautja
    "It was all so different before everything changed."
  • I live in Michigan and my machine room was cold as hell, too! My solution... get more hardware! A side effect is that it generates heat as well (especially anything by intel). So, back in this little space, I have 3 computers, a 17" monitor, a laser printer, a 15 port 10-baseT hub and an ADSL modem in a 10' x 10' study. Whenever I get cold, I fire up another machine! :-) For even more warmth, upgrade that monitor. The larger the monitor, the greater warming power it has!

    -Sol
  • I want one. :(

    Have fun Rob!

    Andrew.

    --
    The Yautja
    "It was all so different before everything changed."

  • Please add a category that will, above all others, classify content from any magazine, newsletter, online service, or death-bed whisper of any quote of publication or statement of employee having any responsibility to anyone living or dead, real or mythical, who may work for Ziff-Davis at any level. I want to block it all out; and if I could, Slashdot might start to look less like Twinkie dairy-style filler and more like ribeye.
  • Rob--

    It'll be really cool. Slashdot headlines to your skytell alpha pager... kinda like the GTK desktop equivs!!!!!


    YEA ROB et al!!!!!
  • thats what quotemeta is for.
    --
    Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
  • Older power supplies tend to do this more.

    Take my friend with his two Apple Lisae... raises the temperature in the room about five degrees when they're both running.

    (Otoh, you don't really want to keep those things on for long, as replacement parts are scarce, but...)

    I guess quantity would do the trick, though. /. needs a Beowulf cluster to serve really efficiently, right Rob?
  • Either that, or someone changed your password on you.
  • I have been switching back and forth between /. and ARS for two months now. I like the fact that I get a little more hardware oriented news there. Now I only have to turn my little head and check their box. Thanks Rob
  • Go with light mode, keep the boxes.. Well, in lynx anyway light mode is cool because there ARE NO BOXES!
  • I second that, just installed AV on my machine and giving it a bash....the log gave numerous time-outs for the pages, I got like 93 files 256Kb and that's without images...spose a pearl mod could extract just the headings OR i could set the AV options to a particular url that generates only headings (or my customised url)...I'll post how it goes :)
  • http://slashdot.org/features/99/03/15/091201.shtml Size limit exceeded for Channel: /. OK AvantGo Channel update warning(s)... Request timed out: http://slashdot.org/books/index.shtml Request timed out: http://slashdot.org/articles/99/03/15/1516238.shtm l Size limit exceeded for Channel: /. --- [ 3/17/99 4:49 PM ] Update Completed --- ohh...exceeded the limit :(
  • To hell with that, let us /.ers in on the venture capital financing round! Rob gets new hardware now and all of us (including Rob) get rich later!

    VC is where you start. It's also where it's at if you know you've got a success on your hands. When the IPO lemming buyers get their hands on it, the investment grows an order of magnitude or three.

    Think about it Rob, a small farm of multiprocessor Alpha boxes, one of those cool new SGIs, a Thinkpad, a Palm V, and 50,000 BTUs of pre-paid heat!

    No more space heaters for him, we'll get him the BFH-9000.
  • The new features rock pretty hard, but come on Rob, I'd love to use slash 0.3(ish) and contribute. CVS IT!
  • Add a way to order the boxes on the right and voila!

    As if you didn't have enough geeks sucking up!
  • Is the pages really filled with > 65k's of information or is it just a lot of dead meat (like formatting)? When I sit @ home with modem i get abt 65k, then..stalled. Annoying.

    Anyhow, /. rocks!!
  • > Add a way to order the boxes on the right and
    > voila!

    Uhhh... you can. That's what the little up and down triangles are around the "X". ;)

    You may have to customize your sidebar to do it.
  • try refreshing/reloading the page?

    either a) tun off your proxy
    or b) ask your ISP to add .pl to their list of either non cached pages, or pages which expire quickly
  • Rob,

    Love the new preferences, but of course being given all these nice new things just makes me want more. Some suggestions

    1. Can news.com be a box with their headlines?

    2. The buttons for moving the boxes are a bit small, I have hit X several times by mistake. As the hint does not distinguish between the different parts of the image it is not easy to tell if you have your mouse in the right place.

    3. I would like a special page to be able to go and see all the boxes so I can quickly see which ones I might like to add.

    4. It might be nice to have a means of seeing the standard page in a simple way (also an all options page). I would look at my minimalistic custom page most of the time but would like to see the rest occasionally without logging out.

    5. I would like to be able to have the Alta-Vista box with the default language preset to English.

    Many thanks for this great site and all your work.

    Dave
  • I second this, although I would like the option to have them at the bottom of the page.

    So 3 options

    As Now
    At Bottom
    Not at all

    Thanks

    Dave
  • If you are running a Unix system (might work for Win95/NT, or Mac, but I have no idea) a package called Junkbuster exists which will filter out all urls matching patterns you give it. Just start it up, add "adfu.blockstackers.com" to it's blockfile, and point your browser's proxy at the local port on which it is hosted. Alternatively, Junkbuster could be hosted on a separate computer, such as on your home router box or at your ISP.

    Took me two minutes once I found out Junkbuster was installed by Debian!
  • Take a look at the upper right hand corner of the boxes. You should see three little icons. An up-arrow, an X and a down-arrow. Try clicking one. It's a slow process, but they move.
  • Would be nice to be able to see the articles (on the index page) with oldest at the top and newest on the bottom, rather than reading them from bottom up.
  • Woah! How come you knew the content of my bookmarks Rob? I've just checked and the only bookmarks I've got that aren't in a nice little box somewhere on my new dynamic SlashDot are the work related ones!

    Excellent work :-)

    SlashPortal :-)
  • I thought his job was running slashdot/Blockstackers along with various other misfits.

    Sounds pretty swanky to me. (Hmm - there's a joke there somewhere)

    (See the BSI link to the left).

    ...j
  • adfu not server ads on slashdot means no money for rob and friends, means they have to get real jobs, means slashdot withers and dies.

    dickhead.

    ...j
  • Any chance of boxes for these two.

    But I think if many more boxes are added I'll have reached the limit that I can save with my preferences.

    Thanks

    Dave
  • The down button does not work for the top box, nor does the up button for the second box.

    This way of moving boxes is a bit slow as the whoile page needs re-loading for every move. An interface which allows me to type a position number for each box would be faster.

    Thanks

    Dave
  • Reminds me of when I went to the Dominican Republic a couple of years ago; the local I was with got out of the beach shower, shivered and said "Es frio".

    I nearly fell over and said "Frio? Frio? You want to come to England if you think _this_ is frio!"

    So maybe Rob's not such a big wuss after all...
  • Nah, just add more space heaters. You can never have to many. Well, unless you're managing to jam cable. :}

    It is nice having multiple systems up, even if some are antiquated. My primary is currently hosed (bad potato problems), so I'm using my secondary to post this.

    Is looking for a good faraday cage...
  • Messing around with slashbox the other day, I decided i wanted a Jennicam that updated like the real one.. so I went and borrowed some of her java and made a jennicam that reloads from her members page every two minutes and includes a link to the resizeable image.. I didnt know what I was doing (I have never written any html or java) so make whatever improvements you think it needs. I cant post it here because it doesnt show up right, and Im sure no one would apreciate that either, so email me if you want it.

    Rob - Great improvements on the page! Let us know if theres anything you need.
    some suggestions:
    We need a place to post slashbox code or something without cluttering up the message forum.
    It would be nice to have some links to return me to a post i just replied to rather than having to go back to the slashdot page and drill down again or hit back.
  • Thanks for adding my suggestion! So, you read all e-mails, but does not answer them?
  • On your point 4, the cool Slashdot Light option is working now (select from the preferences thing), and this removes all the tables & nearly all the icons. Boy, that loads fast.

    How does Jenni keep her place so tidy?

  • XEarth (Score:1)

    by QZS4 ( 7063 )

    >you should also add some sort of weather box.

    How about an xearth with customizable view coordinates, so you can easily check whether the sun is up or not where you are...

  • what's quotemeta? i don't see anything in the faq about it.
    --
  • It does work from my school account, but I get the same blank page as you do from my Linux box at home. I suspect it might have something to do with Junkbuster and proxy forwarding I'm using :)
    Try turning of your proxy settings and see if that works...
  • Fender 12's sound sweet, however since this is your first 12er acoustic, remember barre chords can be an embarrasing thing after coming off of a low action electric =^} Keep on jammin.... I can hear Over the Hills and Far away now ......

  • XEarth (Score:1)

    by itp ( 6424 )
    Heh...try a window. :-)

    --
  • I forgot.. (got too excited about that fender) Thanks for the cool stuff you've been adding... It really goes a long way

  • jennicam (Score:1)

    by malx ( 7723 )
    Rob, this is fantastic. I'm dead impressed. A useful portal!

    I can't believe I'm admitting to this in public, but I've selected Jennicam and it doesn't seem to update.

    Yes, I've set my browser (N4.07) to validate the page each time, and the main page updates fine, just not the JenniJPG.

    If you modified that code so it piped the image through a script you could knock out an HTTP header, maybe Pragma: no cache or maybe an expires 2 minutes in the future (remember not everyone lives in EST though!). Of course, you'd want to proxy-cache the image on your side, and this would mean you were using /. bandwidth not hers, but that's only fair.

    I understand if you don't want to do this, but I wanted to draw it to your (team's, I hope) attention.

  • It might help to turn your "Comment Spill" up over 100 on your preferences page.
  • I don't like having the closeboxes around, where I could accidentally close a box, forcing me to dig to the preferences to re-enable it.

    A way to disable the closeboxes would be nice.
  • -------------
    God - Learn to spell
    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16, @09:51

    You cant "feal" your fingers?
    -------------

    Hey, AC -

    ---> ' ---

    'nuff said...
  • Over 100 comments:Printing out Index Only

    I always want to read the posts flat. I don't want to have to hit the server a hundred times to read the comments. I prefer to just get one big file and read it at my leisure all day.
  • Just create a separate slashdot account to use on your PalmPilot. So the Booker account will keep your current settings, and Booker-Palm will be set to a minimal view for PalmPilot use.
  • The lite version is great... but could it be made
    available as a separate, fixed URL, so we Avantgo
    users can just point at that? I like the boxes
    when I am using a fatter browser, so I don't want
    to customize for the lite mode...

  • Rob,

    Some boxes like Freshmeat have the box title as a link and also a "more ..." link at the bottom.

    Others like Linux Today, Ars Technica, 32bits online just have the "more ..." link at the bottom.

    1. can we always have the box title as a link for these types of boxes?

    2. I would prefer to save space and not have the more at the bottom of the box

    3. In our personal slashbox can the heading automatically be a link to our home page?

    These changes are great.

    Dave
  • Rob,

    Nice job. I love it! Some much faster on my lame computer. :)
  • Could http://www.stepwise.com be added to a grey box? It is a site for Next/OpenStep/MacOsX news.
  • What's the standard protocol for submitting bug reports around here?

    I've noticed that when I first enter the page, there's about a 33% chance that I will get logged in as some random user. If I were a more malicious sort, I could have changed the preferences of these users as well...

    Other than that, Keep up the good work guys!

  • This is the coolest, Rob. It's FAST (with my pipe, rendering used to take longer than downloading)! It's easy on the eyes!

    Keep up the good work, mon.

  • Avantgo isn't going to give me a chance to log in as one or the other, so that's a pain (Unless I can feed my nick/pass in the url... Hm, I'll look into that.

    A special URL that defaults to the simple page would still be the easiest way to go (for me - dunno about for Rob!)
  • Does anybody (Rob? obviously you know something) know where CNN's backend is? Is there info on their web site somewhere? (If there is, I can't find it.) I was going to try to put a CNN newsfeed on my company intranet--but I can't find any info.
  • Hear, hear!

    Hell, it just looks better than vanilla slashdot!

    Rock on, rob. Keep it up.

  • Gee, Rob, you're like, my hero! Your CGI-fu is second to none!

    OK, I do have a request, though: I'd _really_ like to see the code for the CNN box...
  • Great job Rob!

  • No Icons (disable topic icon images on stories) ...but not for the adz :(
  • I've been unable to load up JenniCam at all-- OK, folks, have we /.ed JenniCam? This should go into the books, IMHO.

    BTW-- what are the famous sites we've /.ed?

  • Yeah, people should be able to disable the ad banner... of course, they would have to pay for their subscription instead, so that /. still gets necessary revenue ;) -- Kevin
  • Perhaps you should consider e-mailing the Junkbuster people. It's not Rob's job to ensure that his page works through every single little content filtering and proxying mechanism that's out there. If the page does not display correctly when you're using a filtering agent, it's the filtering agent's fault.
  • The ads are what keep Slashdot in business. If you allowed people to turn the ads off, most people would, which means most people would not be tempted to click on an ad one day when something mildly interesting does manage to pop up. This means Rob does not get any money and Slashdot will go away.

    Stop whining. Those ads are the only reason Slashdot is here right now. You might even wish to consider clicking on one of them one day and buy something to support Slashdot.

    Hah, yah right.
  • If the page does not display correctly when you're using a filtering agent, it's the filtering agent's fault.

    whose fault is it that /. says that every new nick i try to register is taken, when it isn't?
    --

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