Hi, Short summary: 1. Less/Better contents of left sidebar. 2. Switch left and right sidebars. Details: 1. Three days ago I was thinking that packages.gentoo.org wasn't very nice: it was 300K page which took quite a while to be opened to me, due to the left bar and its huge number of items. I tried examining the source to see if there was something which could have be done to decrease its size. Yesterday I saw that somebody changed its behaviour to only show the first 19 items for each day, and now the page loads quite faster. Good! But only partially. Infact it kills one of the real interesting things of packages.gentoo.org: what's been added today (or late yesterday depending on your timezone...) I think that limiting the items for the present day (and maybe the past day, see above) is not good. Limiting the items for the other days (day -3, -4, -5, -6 and -7) is surely good and I would even remove them completely: I see little use for those "old" informations. I explain this better: I think that people either have an "emerge sync" in a cron job, or do it manually. The first case has nothing to do with packages, obviously. In the latter case, I think people will do an "emerge sync" for three reasons only: a) They haven't done it for a long while (more than 3-4 days). b) A GLSA has been posted and the issue fixed. c) They see that something nice was added today in portage (via left sidebar in packages.gentoo.org). This means that the items of day -4, -5, -6 and -7 are ignored and take up unneeded space. Obviously this scenario has been experienced by me and I can speak for myself only, but it seems to me that it's a high-probabilistic scenario. :-) 2) Try browsing packages.gentoo.org w/ lynx and the desire to search for a package. You have to wait for the page to complete (which was a longer wait until three days ago), then scroll down to the last page and finally you can now do your search. For this reason, I think it would be better to switch the left and right sidebars. Keep in mind that since the left bar has a lot of content (the majority of the entire page) while the right bar has very little content, this change would not mean any difference in load times. It would be a usability improvement at no cost. Best regards, Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
I second that. Also, the left sidebar can be loaded at last and still be positioned to the left. It can be done in CSS (example): http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/
Made historical listing smaller. Only expands current and previous day. Leaving historicals on the "left" side.
