The Kernel Hub (kernelhub.org)

[patrik]

I've release a first public beta version of The Kernel Hub

The Kernel Hub is a LKML reader with some extra fuzz around it. It has the ability to figure out the nature of an email and sort it accordingly. It also keeps track of developers, which makes it easy to find discussions based on who participates in them. I'm also working on tag-support. With tags you can see what is going on with your favourite driver / subsystem.

The purpose was initially to help myself keep track of the LKML but as it grew I figured others might be interested too. The archive is currently a little thin (dates back to 30th Dec 2011) but I'm looking at ways to get more in there.

Give it a try and tell me what you think. Bug reports are welcome.

[not.sure]

Some nice ideas there (per-developer view, tags).

A few issues (mostly in comparison to lkml.org):
There is a lot of wasted vertical space with the summary message display ("Home","Messages"):
<author>
<date>
<subject>
seems too much (and who cares about the exact time and date really?). Personally I'd go with
<author> <date> <subject> or so.

Individual message display: black text on grey background not so good.

"Message" page: I find the per-day statistics on top not that important or interesting. Could be moved to some "Statistics" page? There should be space for like 100 messages without too much scrolling.

Will it be more reliable than lkml.org? That would be really cool.

[patrik]

Some nice ideas there (per-developer view, tags).

Thanks for the feedback

A few issues (mostly in comparison to lkml.org):
There is a lot of wasted vertical space with the summary message display ("Home","Messages"):
<author>
<date>
<subject>
seems too much (and who cares about the exact time and date really?). Personally I'd go with
<author> <date> <subject> or so.

You have a point here. I myself like to see the exact time and date since I read it very frequently. Gives you the feeling you are following stuff in real-time.

I'm not sure in which direction I wanna go...
1) Cram as much as possible into every view (for the frequent visitor)
2) Make stuff as clean and clear as possible (for the casual visitor)

Maybe I can do both, and let the visitor decide a theme or something.

Individual message display: black text on grey background not so good.

Yeah, the font even makes it look like grey on grey, I've been playing with various colors, fonts and font sizes, but haven't found a good mix of readability / looks. PRE-tag horror.

"Message" page: I find the per-day statistics on top not that important or interesting. Could be moved to some "Statistics" page? There should be space for like 100 messages without too much scrolling.

Yeah, I had a statistics page in the beginning but moved things out on the various pages to make it look less technical. Again, it's frequent vs casual visitors. There are also various performance reasons for not showing too much on a single page. I've spent a fair amount of time optimizing queries and playing with huge datasets so make sure the web server can handle a couple of years of message history. 6 months on LKML is about 400-500 MB of message bodies, ~50 000 headers, a few 100 000 CC entries, etc. Mix and match these based on date, type, developer makes the server go down on it's knees without proper optimizations.

Will it be more reliable than lkml.org? That would be really cool.

Hopefully yes, but it all comes down to what hosting I can afford. Disk space is not an issues but the ability for the MySQL server to keep things hot in cache is crucial.

[patrik]

Some updates,

Tag support is now operational. People tag very differently so it is impossible to parse all of them without getting too many false positives.
I followed the advise and removed time and dates. You can always click on the message and get the exact date and time there.
Some messages get corrupted or doesn't decode but I suspect that is something with the IMAP library in PHP. Will investigate further.

Still in need of feedback and ideas, anything is welcome.

Thanks