Come on in! Kick the tires, click some thumbs and tell me everything that needs fixing!
To start, my apologies to anybody who started getting e-mail messages from bostonblogs.com about old comments. That was the staging server and as I was adding in comments from the past couple of weeks, somehow the comment notification system got activated and went into a frenzy of, well, notification. I've turned it off for now until I can figure out how to purge all the old data so it doesn't keep spamming people with old notifications.
So, yeah, you can once again ask: What's upthumb? To which, of course, one can only reply: Not much, what's up with you, thumb? Anyway, there are thumbs all over the comments, just waiting for you to click on them.
In case you missed my note a couple days ago, I didn't set out to change everything just because I could, but because the software I'd long used is essentially kaput - no more support, no security patches. I can talk at long, boring length about why I went with Backdrop, but let's get to the new stuff here:
Posting comments
Unfortunately, no more bbcode - those quasi-HTML tags that let you link and embed images and stuff. In its place is an actual HTML-tag editor. Want to link a word or phrase? Highlight it in the text box, hit the link button and paste in the URL. The image tags works similarly.
If you want to embed a YouTube or Vimeo, there's now a field for that: Paste in the video's URL (like, say, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBbmD20FuSE) and paste it in the video box and when you hit submit, voila: Video. Should be possible to embed Facebook videos as well, but hold that thought as I investigate the way to grab the URLs for those (probably something simple).
You can now paste in emojis, so yay if you like those.
Ultimately, I'll be swapping out this system for a WYSIWYG editor that will, among other things, have an emoji picker (it's actually in place for folks who post articles here, more on that below; for some reason, it's not working with comments).
Menu items
Some items have shifted from the left to the right at the top of the page: My Account, Log Out and Post. And they're in red.
Posting articles
Works basically the same as before for folks with accounts on the system, with one key exception: No more blog posts. Instead, there are articles. I've converted all the blog posts to articles, so your content is still there and at the same URLs. You can see your posts by clicking on My Account. This may have destroyed your blog RSS feed, though. If you were using that, let me know and I'll get it running.
Also, instead of the old text editor, you should now get a WYSIWYG menu. It doesn't currently let you embed an image like you might be used to. But instead, you can upload an image to the server and have that embedded in your post. Couple of requests: Don't upload copyrighted images (from other news sites, for example), and don't upload ginormous files (I think the system limits you to 2 MB). To upload photos, click on the image button and you'll get a popup. Select the image on your end, give it a text description (for visually impaired visitors) and, if you happen to know them, the image dimensions (if not, don't worry about it). In most cases, you can ignore the alignment choice as well, unless you're spending more time worrying about the layout of your comment than it might deserve, but if you do want to have your comment's text wrap around the image a particular way (say, with a small headshot photo), you can.
And, yes, the editor has an emoji picker - click on the happy face. There's another toolbar button that looks sort of like a horseshoe (OK, it's an omega), which will let you paste in a variety of special characters, from mathematical terms (can't imagine why you'd need to put a sigma in a comment, but you can), to various currency images (finally, a way to easily discuss prices in London).
Maps
I've switched the mapping system here from one based on Google to an open-source system, which means I can now put maps at the bottom of articles, in addition to on index pages (Google Maps works great, but it is pretty costly for sitewide use).
I'm sure there's stuff I've missed, so again, anything busted or odd, let me know.
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Comments
Afternoon update
By adamg
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 4:22pm
Fonts for articles on both the home page and in the articles themselves are now larger and serif-y. I'm back to the old style of putting more than just like a four-word blurb on the home page.
The Search page now actually works.
The comment text boxes still don't work. I must be missing something, both for why I can't assign a WYSIWYG editor to comments and why the editor that is there is busted in the way it isn't doing line breaks like it should. For now, to get paragraphs, hit return twice after each paragraph, for which I apologize - hopefully I won't start telling you to put three spaces between the state and the Zip code in your correspondence next.
If you want to scroll through your commenting/posting history, and are logged in, you can now do that by clicking on My Account at the top right - you'll see a box at the bottom of your page where you can switch between your comments and any articles you may have posted.
If you're logged in, the site might still seem a bit slow. I didn't do as good a job cleaning up 20 years of accumulated dust and broken stuff in the database as I thought, and didn't realize that until I made the staging database live and it started getting hit by spiders and stuff that remember articles from 2011 and are just checking in to say hi and so kicking off database queries for stuff that might no longer be there and it's kind of not good. I'm slowly working through all that (and kids: Always back up your database right before you do something like delete entire tables, you might not think they're still being called up, but you'll find out pretty quickly they are and you'll be so grateful you can just put those tables right back).
more fonts stuff
By JJ
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 4:31pm
The main article is serif but the comments are all sans. I'm actually in the sans camp on this one. The comments are easier on my eyes than the article text.
Nice work, Adam
By Ari O
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 4:41pm
A lot of websites are poorly-designed and then update their design every couple of years. Some number of websites are well-designed and then update their website for a worse experience.
Few websites are so well-designed that they outlive their infrastructure and have owners smart (stubborn?) enough not to mess them up. Congrats on keeping your website simple and functional!
Registering?
By anon
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 9:35pm
The new design was a fine opportunity for those of us in the Long Time Lurkers Society to finally come out of the closet. But alas, is there no new account registration anymore?
Actually hasn't been self-registering for awhile
By adamg
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 11:45pm
Durn spammers. But send me e-mail with the name you'd want and I can set up an account for you. I should put a note to that effect on the Log In page, though.
new comments links not working
By Jeff F
Tue, 02/04/2025 - 3:55am
The underlying url has …/#new postpended but that just places focus at the top of the article.
I tried it logged in on chrome, safari and firefox on both ios and mac - same behavior.
For me, this is a minor issue.
(btw should we keep using this comment thread for rollout notes or do you prefer dms?
Font size & readability
By b2ool
Tue, 02/04/2025 - 4:39am
Text blocks, whether they be article body or comments, are currently just a little bit too small to be read comfortably, esp on mobile (phone or iPad). Even when I embiggen, it’s still not quite big enough (unless I embiggen such that the line of text overflows the screen edge, necessitating scrolling left/right as well as up and down ).
I find that if text blocks are kept to <15 words per line I can embiggen it enough so the font size is adequate.
Also this “rule” makes it easier for the eyes to track accurately to the next line of text.
As an example
By b2ool
Tue, 02/04/2025 - 4:54am
NYTimes, Boston Globe article text body is ~12-15 words per line & very legible 🤓
Thanks for putting in so much sweat equity
By deedle
Tue, 02/04/2025 - 11:42am
Thank you so much for caring for this site for so long, and so well. Technical debt is a soul-sapping burden.
One item on my UHub wish-list is Fediverse/ActivityPub comment integration. That doesn't appear possible in Backdrop at this time (there's a module for Drupal 10+, but not D7 or Backdrop). Maybe for the next overhaul! In the meantime, are you auto-cross-posting to Mastodon (via Mastotoot), or doing it manually?
Comment/new comment counter
By crispino
Wed, 02/05/2025 - 12:01pm
Hi Adam, I'm not sure if it's just me, but as of 2/5/25 the comment counter is still broken for me. It lists comments as new comments even after I've read them. It will sometimes reduce the listed number of new comments but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.
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