As you may notice, the top of the page looks a bit different. The main thing I wanted to do was to see if I could move the content up a bit higher on the page - which I did mainly by getting rid of the gigantic "Universal Hub" (also, you Courier haters will notice the change in the font). In practical terms, the main change is for you logged-in users who post new items here - the POST link is now in a different location, at the very top of the page (if that drives you nuts, let me know; it's easy enough to move back down).

I'll probably be making some addition modifications to the rest of the page at some point - the blueish tags section sort of doesn't work on index pages because it's hard to tell at first glance if it goes with the post it's immediately below or the post it's immediately above.

Oh, as long as I'm talking about changes, here's the deal with anon comments on posts:

The phenomenon of blogging has been around long enough for writers and pollsters to study it. In July, Pew/Internet and American Life Project published a study called

“BLOGGERS: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers.”

You can find the full report (pdf) here. Take a quick gander at their findings below. Do you see anything there that surprises you?

I did that this morning - and managed to wipe out three+ years of neighborhood/town tags for every single post on Universal Hub (on the plus side: I discovered the database here works REALLY fast). No, I don't have a back up of the database from which to restore them. Because I'm a dolt.

Fortunately, the posts themselves are still here (hooray for data stored in different tables!), and I can use other tags to retag a lot of stuff (for example, I've already added "Cambridge" as a tag to every post that contains the phrase "Cambridge Police"). But in the meantime, if some of the neighborhood and city/town pages seem a bit skimpy, that's why (also in the meantime, I need to read up on how to set up an automated MySQL backup, since I clearly can't be trusted around a database).

I've started playing with some of the location-based modules available for the core software underneath Universal Hub. One of the things you can do is set up a map that shows the locations your posts are about (once you tag them with addresses). Here's the first:

It's a map of the 50 most recent geographically-specific Universal Hub posts (or will be, once I've actually tagged enough posts). Once I've worked out some interface issues, I'll open it up to everybody who posts on UH (it seems to be pretty cool - you type in an address and city, and the software grabs the appropriate coordinates from Google Maps).

And I'll look at extending it to other things, from locations of cool photos to crime maps (I'm currently building Boston Crime with Movable Type and a lot of manual looking up on Google Maps). But before I go too map crazy, what sorts of things would you folks like to see on a map?

UPDATE: I think it's fixed now. I uploaded the latest version of the Atom module and now images are showing up in the feed (although you might have to wait for new images; I don't think old ones will show up).

If you get the UH RSS feed, but don't see any images (for example, on that post about the kite festival or the clown car right below this one), could you let me know which RSS reader you use? The images seem to come in OK in FeedDemon. Thanks!

The whys and hows in handy FAQ format:

Yep, I'm finally getting around to it. I think all the technical issues are solved, and I'm back from vacation, with plenty of time on my hands, so:

Sometime tomorrow evening, I'll flip the switch on requiring a login to post here. Reasons in a nutshell: Too many anonymi, too many cheap, third-grade insults, etc., etc. I realize that not all anon users are quick on the insult draw and most of you have interesting things to say, but I'd hate to see other folks driven off by the minority who do get out of hand. This is NOT an attempt to identify users (you can be as anonymous as you like - get a HotMail account, register some name, then delete the HotMail account).