DOC tweak release notes: promote response.follow, mention logging/stats changes

docs/news.rst

@@ -11,29 +11,42 @@ but quite a few handy improvements nonetheless.
 
 Scrapy now supports anonymous FTP sessions with customizable user and
 password via the new :setting:`FTP_USER` and :setting:`FTP_PASSWORD` settings.
-**And if you're using Twisted version 17.1.0 or above, FTP is now available
-with Python 3.**
+And if you're using Twisted version 17.1.0 or above, FTP is now available
+with Python 3. 
+
+There's a new :meth:`response.follow <scrapy.http.TextResponse.follow>` method
+for creating requests; **it is now a recommended way to create Requests
+in Scrapy spiders**. This method makes it easier to write correct
+spiders; ``response.follow`` has several advantages over creating
+``scrapy.Request`` objects directly:
+
+* it handles relative URLs;
+* it works properly with non-ascii URLs on non-UTF8 pages;
+* in addition to absolute and relative URLs it supports Selectors;
+  for ``<a>`` elements it can also extract their href values.
+
+For example, instead of this::
+
+    for href in response.css('li.page a::attr(href)').extract():
+        url = response.urljoin(href)
+        yield scrapy.Request(url, self.parse, encoding=response.encoding)
+
+One can now write this::
+
+    for a in response.css('li.page a'):
+        yield response.follow(a, self.parse)
+
+Link extractors are also improved. They work similarly to what a regular
+modern browser would do: leading and trailing whitespace are removed
+from attributes (think ``href="   http://example.com"``) when building
+``Link`` objects. This whitespace-stripping also happens for ``action``
+attributes with ``FormRequest``.
 
-Link extractors now work similarly to what a regular modern browser would
-do. Especially, leading and trailing whitespace are removed from attributes
-(think ``href="   http://example.com"``) when building ``Link`` objects.
-This whitespace-stripping also happens for ``action`` attributes with
-``FormRequest``.
 **Please also note that link extractors do not canonicalize URLs by default
 anymore.** This was puzzling users every now and then, and it's not what
 browsers do in fact, so we removed that extra transformation on extractred
 links.
 
-There's a new ``response.follow()`` shortcut for creating requests directly
-from a response instance and a relative URL.
-For example, instead of::
-
-    scrapy.Request(response.urljoin(somehrefvalue))
-
-you can now use the simpler::
-
-    response.follow(somehrefvalue)
-
 For those of you wanting more control on the ``Referer:`` header that Scrapy
 sends when following links, you can set your own ``Referrer Policy``.
 Prior to Scrapy 1.4, the default ``RefererMiddleware`` would simply and
@@ -44,6 +57,10 @@ And this policy is fully customizable with W3C standard values
 (or with something really custom of your own if you wish).
 See :setting:`REFERRER_POLICY` for details.
 
+To make Scrapy spiders easier to debug, Scrapy logs more stats by default
+in 1.4: memory usage stats, detailed retry stats, detailed HTTP error code
+stats. A similar change is that HTTP cache path is also visible in logs now.
+
 Last but not least, Scrapy now has the option to make JSON and XML items
 more human-readable, with newlines between items and even custom indenting
 offset, using the new :setting:`FEED_EXPORT_INDENT` setting.
@@ -60,7 +77,7 @@ New Features
 - Enable memusage extension by default (:issue:`2187`) ;
   **this is technically backwards-incompatible** so please check if you have
   any non-default ``MEMUSAGE_***`` settings set.
-- New :meth:`Response.follow <scrapy.http.Response.follow>` shortcut
+- New :ref:`response.follow <response-follow-example>` shortcut
   for creating requests (:issue:`1940`)
 - Added ``flags`` argument and attribute to :class:`Request <scrapy.http.Request>`
   objects (:issue:`2047`)