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    hello, i am a long time regular reader of phoronix. i like the news coverage and i like the articles and i like the writing style. what i don't like is the summary in the rss feed.

    the problem as i see it is: the summary in the rss feed is a string cut from the beginning of the article up to a seemingly random length. this string can end anywhere in the middle of the first paragraph or anywhere else in the article.

    usually i read the title of the feed, based on that i decide whether i want to read the short summary in the feed, and based on that i decide whether i want to read the entire article (by clicking on the link in the feed). sadly this does not work well on the rss feed from phoronix.

    asume i decided to read the entire article based on the summary in feed: ideally i would like to continue reading the article from the spot where the summary ended, ideally this would be the second paragraph, but in phoronix this is not the case. since the summary can end anywhere in the middle of the first paragraph or anywhere else, i am forced to scan the article from the beginning and look for the spot where the summary ended and then continue reading. this basically means that i am forced to read the summary a second time. sure this is not the end of the world, but it is still bothersome.

    my suggestion: make sure that the summary in the feed is always the first paragraph of the article. then when i decide to read the entire article i know that i can start at the second paragraph. bonus points when you phrase the first paragraph to be a real summary for the rest of the article.

    another suggestion: differentiate between short news items and longer news items or original articles. short news items would be news items which fit in one paragraph. longer news items or original articles should contain at least three paragraphs. then i can see in the rss feed summary whether this is a short news item (which means that there is nothing more to read other than this one paragraph), or whether it is a longer news item or an original article (which means there is more information in the complete article on the website). that way i can decide whether it is worth it to click on the link in the rss reader to get *more* information on the website.

    ----
    an examples from a recent feed item

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite


    the summary in the rss feed:

    While concerns have been raised about the state of the X.Org Foundation, the 2010 elections have ended and were not extended though it was requested by some X.Org members. The new X.Org Foundation board members include Alex Deucher, Keith Packard, Matthieu Herrb, Matthias Hopf, and Eric Anholt...
    the article on the website:

    While concerns have been raised about the state of the X.Org Foundation, the 2010 elections have ended and were not extended though it was requested by some X.Org members. The new X.Org Foundation board members include Alex Deucher, Keith Packard, Matthieu Herrb, Matthias Hopf, and Eric Anholt. Alex Deucher had the most votes to be seated and this his first time sitting on the board and now provides some AMD representation where he works on their open-source driver stack and documentation. With Matthias Hopf on the board, Novell GmbH has a say as Egbert Eich of the same Novell X team is no longer serving.

    The X.Org Foundation 2010 election results can be found on the X.Org mailing list.
    as you can see the feed summary ends in the middle of the first paragraph. also annoying is the fact that the "second paragraph" is only one sentence long. in this case the "summary" intrigued me to read more, so i clicked on the link to read the rest on the website. i was disappointed because the "complete article" is merely a couple of sentences longer than the summary.

    ----
    another example

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite


    the summary in the rss feed:

    NetworkManager, the free software project that's backed by Red Hat and used by many distributions for easily managing network connections from the Linux desktop, is ready for its version 0.8 milestone. NetworkManager 0.7 is getting old and while NetworkManager 0.7.1 brought some improvements last year, the 0.8 release is rather exciting. NetworkManager 0.8 delivers on much more solid bluetooth support, integration with ModemManager for providing better mobile broadband / cellular connection support, removal of HAL support (similar to X.Org dropping HAL due to its deprecation), proper IPv6 support, and many other improvements. The official NetworkManager 0.8 release announcement has yet to come, but the 0.8.0 release is tagged in Git and as such the snapshot of it is available from the FreeDesktop.org Git repository...
    the article on the website:

    NetworkManager, the free software project that's backed by Red Hat and used by many distributions for easily managing network connections from the Linux desktop, is ready for its version 0.8 milestone. NetworkManager 0.7 is getting old and while NetworkManager 0.7.1 brought some improvements last year, the 0.8 release is rather exciting.

    NetworkManager 0.8 delivers on much more solid bluetooth support, integration with ModemManager for providing better mobile broadband / cellular connection support, removal of HAL support (similar to X.Org dropping HAL due to its deprecation), proper IPv6 support, and many other improvements.

    The official NetworkManager 0.8 release announcement has yet to come, but the 0.8.0 release is tagged in Git and as such the snapshot of it is available from the FreeDesktop.org Git repository. Development snapshots of NetworkManager 0.8 can already be found in the latest versions of Fedora, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions.
    this time the summary went all the way down to the middle of the third paragraph. note that the summary did not have paragraph breaks so there is no way to tell how many paragraphs to skip when searching for the end of the summary in the full article. i was disappointed for two reasons: first, there was barely any additional information in the "full article" compared to the "summary". second, i was forced to read almost the entire article twice because i had to search for where the summary ended.

    ----
    i thank you for your attention. i hope you great editors of phoronix will consider my suggestions and i hope i can contribute for the betterment of phoronix.

  • #2
    The RSS feed for news entries should now show the first paragraph.
    Michael Larabel
    https://www.michaellarabel.com/

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    • #3
      sweet. thanks

      Comment

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