Phoronix Premium Get More Features, Site Work

There's been some more site updates on Phoronix this week along with more features for Phoronix Premium subscribers. This includes continued log-in improvements, bolding external links, and a look at upcoming content.

Phoronix Premium is where by paying just a few dollars per month you can access an ad-free version of Phoronix that allows you to view multi-page articles on Phoronix on a single page (just keep scrolling and read an entire review without loading multiple pages!), there's a special area of the forums for providing feedback, and other functionality. Phoronix Premium goes along way to helping out the site and all of the work that I do single-handedly with spending up to 100 hours per week working on Phoronix, there's associated hardware and energy costs, etc. Hundreds of articles are written on Phoronix each month and all I ask of readers at a minimum is not to use AdBlock or to subscribe to Phoronix Premium.

Earlier this week I wrote about Phoronix Premium improvements made to enhancing the log-in experience. One of the common issues has been a quick log-out time from the forums and needing to go back to the Phoronix Forums to re-activate your Phoronix Premium session. Those issues should now be addressed and the latest improvement I made is making the Phoronix Premium session lasting up to one month (depending upon your browser's cookie settings, IP address, and other factors).

Anyhow, two more features that are exclusive to Phoronix Premium users are:

Alerts about upcoming content. Phoronix Premium users get access to new content at the same time as non-subscribers, but premium subscribers are now shown titles of upcoming articles along with their time-to-publishing. Some Phoronix content is written in advance for Linux hardware reviews to be published on a later date, non-time-sensitive news, etc. Now when going to Phoronix you can see what's coming up for the day ahead.

Inside Phoronix news articles are many links to related Phoronix news stories, etc. Now Phoronix Premium subscribers have external links in bold to more easily differentiate from internal and external links. This will allow Phoronix readers skimming news stories to quickly find any upstream information, etc.

Outside of Phoronix Premium improvements, the home-page to Phoronix (design work and also showing the number of article comments, etc) has received some minor enhancements and there's also some other minor tweaks. I've also switched from using Feedburner (since Google no longer sends ads over Feedburner) to back to having the Phoronix.com-hosted RSS feed as some Phoronix Chinese readers have said the Feedburner/Google-hosted feeds were blocked.

Originally there was going to be a new Phoronix site design this year but there was some criticism to the design that was done by a Phoronix reader and graphics artist. As a result, the complete overhaul has been delayed until a better solution can be devised and so until then I've been making some minor improvements to the existing version.

Hopefully these changes are appreciated and please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium to support this site greatly and/or making a PayPal tip. Feedback on the site changes are welcome in the forums or via @MichaelLarabel on Twitter.