or – Sometimes Phoronix Grinds My Gears.
I don’t have anything against Phoronix, its a valued resource to the Linux graphics community no doubt and I’m thankful for the service it provides, sometimes – like today for example – it just makes me a little sad.
The main thing that irritates me is the endless cross referencing of other posts, for example today – KDE 4.5.3 is released! Yay, I heard about it from Phoronix, good job. However, the entire first paragraph is just cramming as many links to other articles that are related to KDE as possible, in this case an example is QtSceneGraph, an experimental implementation thats not even in upstream Qt yet and not at all related to KDE, also included where articles about the next major release(4.6), and the next super major release (KDE5). We know more page views means more ad revenue for Phoronix, not sure the entire back catalog of links has to be weaved into every story, why not just have “related posts” section like 90% of blogs do?
Its a similar story with the kernel releases, they will link to every other story they have run about that kernel revision, often with it just linking to an index page of stories possibly related to that release, this is always early on, so you will have to read through that before the actual news, but again, they will link relating to stuff that’s not even going to be in this kernel, but the next one, or the next one.
And then after that we get onto the actual news item with a link to source, no problems there, very nice, good job.
The second issue I have with them is the benchmarking of alpha and beta versions, its just my opinion that this is a bad practice… its not done yet! I’m sure it will be argued that it could help the project improve, but this isn’t why Phoronix does it, it does it to get a nice tabloid headline eg “Ubuntu 11.04 alpha 43% slower than 10.10″ that will bring it more ad revenue.
Oh and don’t forget to have plug for their Phoronix Global service as often as possible.
