Welcome to the new UHub

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.