Recent Comments

A good point worth considering.
I found a vid on youtube about a bike rider who had his right arm and leg ripped off. They said he would never ride again. He proved them wrong. Got himself a bike, modified it to left arm left lef only control. Taught himself to get on the bike and ride the race track.
Moral of the story: if a stump is all you have then do what you can with what you have where you are and make the most of it.

When will XP finally "die"

It is quite surprising to see people pop up out of the woodwork to discuss pipedot itself. I suspect |. has a loyal viewership which is a good start for exanding the community.

Seconded.I am finding this to be really useful.

I like the 'I'll post what I'm interested in' technique a lot more than 'I'll post what the masses seem to like'. I've learned a lot of interesting things that way, and it feels like you end up with higher quality material.

I really like the editorial style on pipedot, and I think a lot of it comes down to that attitude. The site isn't designed by committee, one guy just went and added features that he wanted. The editorial staff aren't constantly trying for general appeal, they're just posting what they like.

Meta articles are also a quick measure on the size and involvement of the community. Seeing weeks of articles with only a few comments each makes you wonder if anybody is reading them at all. But Pipedot is a topic we all have a stake in, so you get a better indication of how many people are happy to comment.

How about allowing moderation of articles? So you can see some recent ones and say "oh, that one is marked as insightful, I'll go and read it".

I submit a lot of stories to SN, and occasionally submit the same ones here to see whether the discussion is different, but often forget to do the last "copy over to |." bit. I don't particularly object to anyone from |. publishing a story I submitted on SN (either after it appears on the main page or while it is in the submissions queue), but an earlier comment indicated that you would want different stories anyway.

Mainstream support just means no more Service Pack, whereas extended support is what matters: security patches.

Even Home editions have extended support until 2020, so no worries yet for all our windowers friends (although it seems they must have the latest SP installed to get the extended support).

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2014/07/10/microsoft-windows-7-mainstream-support/

I've messed with the conversion part a few times and I agree with the commenter who said it's hard to figure out (I don't care what it looks like, but it uses programmer logic, not user logic). In fact after a few go-rounds (and discovering it doesn't respect my file locations) I stopped bothering. :(

This is a lowly P4-2GHz with 1.3GB RAM and WinXP. Everything else runs fine (sufficiently well that I'm not terribly motivated to replace it); Calibre is notably sloggy. I don't put =any= books in its library, and occasionally I clean out the trash it leaves in %Temp%.

The bookmark script frequently hangs, too: "A script on this page is running slowly. Do you wish to stop the script? Yes/No" and once it does that, the script will never complete and will sometimes crash the whole program. If it's done it once on a given book, it will do it again in that same part of the file, tho I haven't pinned down a common factor, other than it's more likely with larger files.

Sites
Hacker News
OpenBSD Journal
FreeBSD News

Podcasts
TechTalkToday
TechSnap
BSD Now

And don't forget the good old mailing list, too many to list here (no pun intended)

This would be easy to do via the rss feed.

100% agree, no comments and send through the "pipe" first.

I like the astronomy stuff I just don't comment much, a thumbs up or thumbs down button to indicate that would be useful for me.

I noticed the soy feed instantly killed discussion at Pipedot.

Yes, that was my first thought too when I first came to the site and noticed all the new articles and comments.

I think Pipedot is great, and even though I think feeding articles and comments from other sites is cool in principle, I believe this was the wrong way of doing it. As you mentioned, Pipedot became a reader to SN and not much else. Considering that the comment systems aren't integrated (and that might be tough to fix with SN since it doesn't even run Pipecode), and that every article from SN was duplicated on Pipedot, instead of a select few, it really made no sense.

I'd like to clarify a few things here:

• There was no anger on the part of the SoylentNews team that this happened
• We were mostly surprised by a huge server load (took up half the CPU's capacity on the initial scrape) and finding out about this via user comments on IRC
• NCommander said this in a post here on pipedot:

If we ever manage to get an API for our database coded, I don't think the staff (or I) would have any issue if you spooled in our articles directly (obviously, we have to get a license on new content hammered out before you could do that, but that's on our TODO).

(emphasis mine)

• There's no hard feelings anywhere, we just would have liked to know what was happening ahead of time
• Bryan's always been a great guy and remains one in our books

Back in the day FreeBSD came on DVDs with everything needed to get your system up and running. DSL was just rolling out. Dialup and ISDN were the norm. Today it is easy to just grab whatever you need from the net. Ports tree rocks!

I still have slashdot in my rss feed. Sometimes they have articles of interest. My rss feed is on my pipedot feeds page, of course :)

I really like this type of article. Allows for the community to weigh in, feed back, vent and get involved in how pipedot in faring. I see the email discussions but cannot reply. Sorry. Gave up on mailing lists years ago. Please, keep it up. We like being involved. Mod parent up! :-)

Thanks. I like reading about topics outside my personal sphere of knowledge, however my preference is not to comment unless warrented.A rating and meta feedback system for articles sounds good. Perhaps we can prefix comments with "meta" to flag a response... or everyone could just post saying how much they like or dislike the article...

This I will use for my next project. It has what I would have done myself built in. Most happy to this project for their work.

Awright then, now that I know, look for some more astro stuff. I like those subjects too.

oh, that's why :-(

sorry, I felt dumb to just post "I liked that article" without any kind of extra insight. Indeed a way to share appreciation would certainly help :-)

Smart point. As volunteer editor, I can guarantee you when an article goes up and doesn't generate any discussion, I think, "hmm, shouldn't post more articles like this." If you haven't seen any astronomy articles here recently, that's why: none of the previous astronomy articles generated any talk. And what's the point of posting articles if they don't generate some feedback?

Perhaps articles can have a thumbs up/down button when posted so people can send feedback to submitters even if they don't care to comment on them? Not posting for our health here: probably all of us also has a day job.

I'm really keen on Pipedot being a success, with success defined as a place to learn from interesting news and the experience of community members. It's starting to get there sometimes, but it's also discouraging to see a story pass by with few or no comments. I get that tech stories sometimes don't need a lot of discussion, but maybe there is a way to rate stories as being of interest even when we have nothing to add. Psychologically, perceived approval from peers probably factors in on ones motivation to contribute, even if that seems a little co-dependent.Also, I'm a lurker by preference, but until pipedot is rolling we all need to get out of the lurker's comfort zone as much as possible. Cheers...

Articles without the comments seems like a simple strategy that is easy to do. I'd further send the articles to the pipe first, so they still need up voting to make it onto pipedot front page. Also, any scraped article should have a lead in that links back to the original story and discussion on the source feed. Should be easy to automate the back link in code. That way we get stories and additional discussion here but a direct link back to the source discussion if interested. Also, if there are like ten feed stories in the pipe and none are up voted in a twelve hour cycle, there could be a timer that pushes stories to the front page to keep content turning over on pipedot. Just thinking out loud here.

Right -- gray background for the subject. Happened to be using an aging flat screen, maybe it's starting to fade to green...
Thanks for the color history link.

the comments seem to alternate (randomly?) between blue and green bar backgrounds--what's the logic behind this?

For more information on the "history" colors: http://pipedot.org/story/2014-05-13/read-it

I see blue and grey bars. The blue bars signify new comments since you last viewed the article.

I don't think I'm color blind. I've been tested before.

I don't mind the article stream. It makes it easier to deal with cross posts from users that belong to both communities, but "piping" the comments over and disintegrating the discussion is not so good. Can't we just have the articles without the comments?

Just checked my |. settings and found a check box item:
[ ] Show posts from SoylentNews
When did that appear?

Also, the comments seem to alternate (randomly?) between blue and green bar backgrounds--what's the logic behind this?

In slashdot's defence, while there was much outcry about the beta, you're still not forced into it. I'm rocking classic slashdot without any issues.

Completely agree. I took very much the same path as you (although I started reading slashdot again after I was disapointed with Soylent. They haven't imposed the beta interface on me yet so I'm cool with it). It seems like the members more interested in drama made the switch to soylent (which we should have seen coming, to be honest), and so a lot of the topics are about subjects that people can discuss with little qualification and create drama about.

I instantly noticed the significant drop in comment quality on pipedot when you flipped that switch. Please don't turn it back on.... I'd rather not see content on pipedot for a few days than to let the soylent news stuff in.

I'm glad to see this experiment over. I think it was a major blunder on the part of NCommander to not give this a great deal of public discussion before allowing it to proceed.

I liked seeing stories and comments, but when I realized it was a soylent feed with both stories and comments, I was no longer clear on how to contribute to pipedot. For example, I didn't want to comment because clearly the discussion wasn't integrated. I also lost interest in submitting stories or rating stories in the pipe because the soylent feed was already numerous enough. On the other hand, I've definitely reduced the number of stories I was submitting to pipedot because it was hit or miss whether a story got any uptake and without comments the default interpretation is that the story did not interest the community.I have no easy solutions for this, but one cross-pollination idea is for one story a week to publish across a set of sister sites where the communities can discuss a topic together?

Furthermore, congrats to the Soylent team - the site is looking and getting better every day. You have had some good articles and some good conversations going on there recently.

I also have seen Soylent is struggling with the "not enough articles being submitted and too many of them are off topic or not good" problem too. That's the problem with community-run sites: you need a community and you need them to participate. If Pipedot - or Soylent, for that matter - consists of a bunch of news junkies who come to read but not write, your site is dead in the water.

... and scrape Slashdot instead. Then we don't have to include that beta-infested site in our RSS feeds any more.<P>I know, you'd get your ass sued off by Dice. Frankly, Pipedot needs to survive on its own merits and user base. Besides, scraping sites doesn't cut it, because you can always just subscribe to an RSS feed of the original site - there's no value add. Aggregation without further processing is valueless. If you want to scrape, at least filter for salience to your community - that adds value.

In regard to your point about NCommander giving pipedot permission to run SN content. The rest of the SN staff had no idea this was the case, and when it was originally brought up yesterday, it wasn't clarified.

When statements by NCommander had been found it still wasn't exactly clear that it would also include sharing of the communities comments, not just stories submitted. At the moment it's a bit tricky, as you can reply to an SN comment on this site, and the relevant SN user would have no idea about it. Also, at first the attribution and linking back to SN wasn't as clear as it perhaps should have been.

Personally, I don't have a problem with an arrangement like this (depending on terms), but it took the SN staff (and the community in general) by surprise.

---
n1
Editoral Team
SoylentNews.org
[These are my views and are not necessarily representative of all the SoylentNews.org staff.]

I'm actually worried that the flood of SN articles mirrored here would take away from your own community. I too see |. as a sister site to SN; and I'd like to see you succeed; not just duplicate what we're doing on SN.

So I think there may be a good way to do it - but scraping everything probably isnt the way to go.

... but i do want to congratulate you on the job that script was doing..

-Blackmoore

I absolutely agree. For Soylent content, I'll go to Soylent. I was hoping Pipedot would remain lower-volume, higher-quality and tech-focused.
If 95% of the content on Pipedot is coming from Soylent, then 95% of the reason for Pipedot to exist is gone.

Still, I'd like to be able to filter out SN articles via the GUI, an option box on the front page to hide/show news from SN perhaps? Pipedot has a different feel and while the two are aligned they are not the same.

I agree 100% on this, besides I thought that this is what the feed is for ?

Also I got a bit lost at the huge amount of articles, so I think this was a bit over the top. Would it be possible to only import the most significant SN posts (possibly pre-selected by the editors) to remain, as vanderhoth put it, "more tech focused" ?

Anyway, kudos for at least testing this and moving forward with new ideas :-)

I have to agree. And I prefer them to be divergent. I left /. because I didn't like what they were doing to the site. I left SN because I found only about 10% of the content interesting. I found |. and thought I had finally found a place to my liking: something as close to the old, old /. as I could get. And now |. is becoming a reader for SN. This is not what I am looking for and if the trend continues in the wrong direction then, alas, I will have to start my search again. I really want a site that honestly is "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" and not all of the other junk we get on SN (including the "off the deep end" comments). Please turn off the feed.

I wouldn't mind reading more articles every day of the same quality as the one-a-day pipedot one, on the other hand don't forget quantity != quality

As for submissions, I'm unfortunately more of a "late" reader: whenever I see something interesting on one of my favorite tech sites, it's already been posted here or at SN :-/

I'll happily submit the day I'm first on the ball though ;-)

I think we need to focus on how to get get content on Pipedot. Maybe feedstreams like the Soyfeed (I love that word!) are one approach, but there may be others? This isn't my site and I'm not doing the coding, but just to get the party started, what about things like:

• submit articles by email, using some kind of protocol (first paragraph is the title, second is the intro, third is the link or something). Spam wouldn't be too much of a problem because all articles have to go through an editor anyway
• what about some easy way to go from an RSS reader to a submittal form, like Android's awesome "share via" system that allows you to build various bridges. Or does this mean getting someone to develop an app or equivalent, which would be a totally different and maybe cumbersome coding effort? (but cool/awesome nonetheless)?

I wanted to add that even if two-way communication would not be possible, I like this feature as it brings more sites into one. People like me, mostly lurking and seldom commenting do not need two-way communication.

I hadn't checked PD in a couple of days due to hectic schedule and found.. a WHOLE PAGE of articles. Didn't even realise it was SN.. until I hit the article about pipedot cannibalising SN :P

bwhahahahahaha

Good one Brian. Funniest event so far this year.

Still, I'd like to be able to filter out SN articles via the GUI, an option box on the front page to hide/show news from SN perhaps? Pipedot has a different feel and while the two are aligned they are not the same.

I definitely like it! I hope this will lead to two way cooperation so soylent would also get the comments here.

I have to say I already see them diverging. SN, IMHO, is much more general news it includes a lot of politics and general interest articles. |. is definitely more tech focused, and I like it that way. Problem being, there isn't really much opinion involved with straight up tech news so there's not really all that much to say about it. The few pieces I see on |. that do have some opinion involved are also posted to SN, which has a lot more off the deep end people to argue with... http://xkcd.com/386/