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.
Like the job UHub is doing? Consider a contribution. Thanks!
Ad:
Comments
Does it have a motor?
By Sator
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 6:07pm
Does it have a motor?
staying logged in?
By coffeeweasel
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 6:16pm
Oh, good question
By adamg
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 6:19pm
I didn't even look at that issue. I'll see if there's a way to keep you logged in longer.
More login
By johnmcboston
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 11:29pm
Interesting - formatting
By johnmcboston
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 11:51pm
You're right
By adamg
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 4:11pm
"My account" should read "Log in" if you're not logged in, and there should be a way to get redirected to where came from. I'll add those to the to-do list.
More login
By johnmcboston
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 11:29pm
errrr
By johnmcboston
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 11:30pm
Replicator Gnomes!
By SwirlyGrrl
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 8:06am
Test
By anon
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 6:19pm
Test
Terrible look. Can you change
By anon
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 6:31pm
Terrible look. Can you change the fonts at least?
How so?
By adamg
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 6:35pm
Fonts too big, too small, or something else?
Mixed serif and sans-serif
By coffeeweasel
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 7:08pm
fonts
By JJ
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 7:28pm
Pretty much Times New Roman on the old version
By adamg
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 7:34pm
I can change that easily enough.
Please go with either all serif or all sans serif
By mg
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 11:12pm
better front
By anon
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 3:20pm
I don't think Times New Roman is a good web font any longer. Change the default to "ui-serif" and the OS will pick the font.
The fonts are friendly to my old eyes
By FakeBostonCharlie
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 11:16pm
Are you serious. Adam just
By Scott in JP
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 8:34pm
Are you serious. Adam just spent a lot of time improving this site. No one comes here for sleek design, they come for high quality local news with minimal web crap interference. Get a life.
I prefer the old fonts but
By Brent Jeffries
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 10:36am
Looks good to me
By Cleary Squared
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 7:00pm
Where are the emojis?
By anon
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 7:04pm
I thought you said there would be emojis. Am I missing them somewhere?
For now ...
By adamg
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 7:40pm
You'll have to find them somewhere else, then paste them in, unfortunately.
The problem is that the emoji-enabled WYSIWYG editor is not working in comment boxes for most folks, so I have to try to figure out why I can see it but nobody else can (so some sort of permissions issue no doubt, but so far I'm not seeing where).
Hi
By Jiggles
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 7:39pm
Looks good Gavin!
Prefer the longer lead-ins on the home page
By Charles Bahne
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 7:56pm
In the old version, there was a paragraph, or even two, before you came to the "Read more" link. Many times, the entire story was short enough to be on the home page. In other cases, you could read enough of the story so you could decide whether you wanted to read more or not. In general, I would only click Read more for a few stories each day. The longer lead-ins often gave me enough info, so I'd skip the rest.
Now we just get one sentence before the "Read more" -- meaning that, in almost every case, you have to click the link just to get a basic understanding of the story.
Having the longer intros really made UHub a site that I wanted to engage with. I fear that with the new format, I will look at the home page for 15 or 20 seconds and then move on to some other website.
There were a couple of issues I wrestled with
By adamg
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 8:08pm
Both related to the home page and both related to maybe overthinking issues for mobile users.
I shrunk the size of home-page photos to make the page come up faster on phones - but for desktop users, I also increased the size of images once you click through to the story (for an example, look on the home page for the photo of a hawk with its feathers all ruffled, then click into the story).
Same idea with trimming the length of the home-page blurbs. But if folks prefer the long lengths, text is pretty cheap in terms of bandwidth, so I could easily go back to the old style.
Prefer longer lead-ins
By mg
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 8:33pm
Yay!
By FlyingToaster
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 8:36pm
Next/previous page?
By markk
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 8:01pm
Fixed
By adamg
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 8:18pm
There's now a More news link at the bottom of the home page. I need to play with that a little, because once you get to the More News page, there's no back link to the home page.
One advantage of the new software was that it made it incredibly easy to import all the articles, comments and user accounts (roughly 80,000 articles and 800,000 comments, both of which are like, whoa, where'd they all come from?), because the new software is based on the old software, so shares much of its database configuration.
Love It!!
By Nicole
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 8:05pm
I like the new interface in a sense I see it.. but then again it looks almost the same you did a good job Adam!!!
I like it! Easier on my
By Jack Mullin
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 8:16pm
I like it! Easier on my tired eyes.
how do you paragraph?
By deselby
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 8:59pm
test, test
By deselby
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 9:00pm
also testing
By JJ
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 9:18pm
Apologies
By adamg
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 9:24pm
Now to figure out why
It has that new website smell!
By APB
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 8:56pm
Good job 🏀
By Dave G
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 9:04pm
red text
By Vicki
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 9:05pm
I think either a heavier-weight font or a darker red would help. If you leave the color and font as they are now, I should be OK once I get used to the layout. But that won't help new or occasional users, who need to actually read the text. Also, is there a good way to add paragraph breaks? Using one HTML &p> code before "I think" produced a line break, but no space between the paragraphs. I'm leaving the slightly odd layout here in case it's useful for reference. I
How about now?
By adamg
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 10:34pm
Darker and bolder.
Much better, thank you.
By Vicki
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 10:06am
Time out Button
By Username Unknown
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 10:21pm
Congrats on the migration!
By AdamB
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 10:25pm
So far so good.
By HPboy
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 10:53pm
Not only are the thumbs-ups back
By Neal
Sun, 02/02/2025 - 11:11pm
Dark Mode?
By ENIGMUE
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 4:20am
🎉🎈🩷
By Irma la Douce
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 6:35am
Nice
By cybah
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 8:20am
2nd
By FenwayRyan
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 9:06am
My site agenda for today
By adamg
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 9:37am
Thanks all for the comments!
Today I'll be working to make the fonts more consistent and larger, try to figure out why carriage returns aren't working for most folks and figure out why the search page isn't working.
Plus working to stamp out errors caused by some ancient (like 2010-era) stories are causing the database to start gasping for air.
comment saves are really slow
By JJ
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 9:38am
Some things!
By blues_lead
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 9:40am
More things! Yay!
By blues_lead
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 10:17am
that's some heavy lifting!
By b2ool
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 10:31am
AG, thanks so much for your hard work on this. Good job.
We gonna see the French Toast scale soon?
New comments counter doesn't update
By Lecil
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 11:03am
For me
By brianjdamico
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 1:11pm
They came back for me
By Lecil
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 2:18pm
The new comments counter disappeared for a while, and they seem to be back now, but not accurate, though not all matching the total comments either. Maybe Adam is tinkering in the background?
I'm also finding posting and replying to comments to be really slow today. Again, may be due to some database fussing...?
Comments read
By ElizaLeila
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 4:51pm
You done good Adam!
By MassMouse
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 11:17am
Mobile "hot dog" menu
By markg
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 11:53am
Uploading local images
By markg
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 1:26pm
non-Boston neighborhoods
By Robert Winters
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 12:41pm
Looks great!
By E
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 1:58pm
Testing some formatting features
By Ron Newman
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 2:37pm
This should be bold. This should be italic.
This site is https://UniversalHub.com
Michelle Wu is the Mayor of Boston.
Formatting is a bit...generous
By Kaz
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 2:53pm
There's huge tracts of vertical land on the browser page between all the elements in the comments currently.
There's some sort of bug in your WYSIWYG editor currently. The underline and strikethrough icons are actually the ordered/unordered list and the list icons are actually blockquote and preview buttons (you can see all this in the tooltips for the buttons).
The article titles on the front page feel horizontally compressed/crunched (let'em breathe a bit).
I don't like all the constant swapping between serif/sans serif fonting everywhere...but I can live with it.
Just first thoughts...but kudos on the overhaul over all.
Spaeaking of the "New" box
By Neal
Mon, 02/03/2025 - 4:09pm
It doesn't stand out as much in green as it did in red. Before when reviewing new comments in threads, I would sometimes scroll down, keeping on the lookout for the red "new", so I knew where to stop. With the green coloring, it doesn't stand out as much, so if that is something that can be changed, I recommend changing it to red, bright yellow, or some color that stands out more easily.
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!
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