Unless you use IE, or are one of the other folks for whom the site had been looking odd in recent weeks. I've changed the template set used by UHub to fix display problems for such folks. Follks on phones may also see a bit of a different, hopefully better, display.
Everybody else, I hope, won't notice much of a difference, except maybe for the spacing between lines of text, which I've tightened up a bit. But please let me know about any oddities you see.
I'm seeing a growing number of comments along the lines of "you jerk, go die!" (actually, even worse, but you get the idea) If you're posting anonymously (i.e., you're not logged in, even if you do fill in the "name" field), sorry, I'm not going to mark that for public consumption. If you want to tear into somebody's position, by all means, go for it, but it's not closing time at a dive bar here and I'd like to try to keep things somewhat civil. As they say on MetaFilter:
Just installed a jaunty little thumb thing, which you'll now find at the end of every single comment.
The software has the ability to do both up and down votes. I decided not to enable down votes, at least not yet, because we're already a fairly cantankerous group as a whole, and I didn't feel like adding still more negativity to the site. I do need to see if I can move the thumb to the top right corner of a comment, if only because that's how the old system worked, and, you know, tradition.
Let me know what you think. And should I enable this on the posts themselves, in addition to the comments?
The token's time had come. Hopefully, the rest of the site won't feel too odd (but let me know if it does - especially the font for the article text).
The real reason for the change wasn't to mess with the graphics, though - it was more to upgrade to the latest version of the Drupal software that runs the site. I'm sure you'll find some broken stuff - please let me know!
One thing that's missing is the ability to upvote comments. I stupidly didn't think to look until it was too late whether the software I was using for that had been upgraded along with the rest of the software. It hadn't There are alternatives, one of which I'll install.
UPDATE: Site's been updated.
The current server's being switched over to a shinier and beefier machine.
Here's a new UHub rule: If you keep posting a link to the same conspiracy-nut article about the Marathon to Marathon-related posts here, even after you're asked not to, I will block your account.
I'm slowly wending my way through a major upgrade to the software that runs Universal Hub (for the CMS types: From Drupal 6 to 7).
You hopefully won't see much difference in the site - it'll still be your basic blog format - unless you connect with a mobile device. One of the things the new templates let me do fairly easily is have pages show up differently depending on what sort of device you're using to call up the site; I'm thinking it'd be nice to have smartphone users get readable type right away, rather than having to resize the page first. If you want to take a look, point your smartphone at
When you post a reply to a post or comment, you'll now have to type in letters you see in a "captcha" box, at the bottom of the posting form. This is actually something you used to be required to do up until a few months ago, when I upgraded the software and it managed to turn that off and I didn't realize it, despite the increase in spam that started showing up in the message approval queue. You should only have to fill out this mini-form once per session (i.e., if you post a reply, then click to another discussion and post, you shouldn't see it again). Registered users never have to fill out the box.
Which I am thrilled to death to announce because over the past couple of years running Universal Hub fulltime, I've learned that ad sales is an art - and I'm still at the paint-by-numbers stage.
With any luck, we should have honest-to-goodness UHub iPhone and BlackBerry apps up and running in about a month (I just spent a good part of a perfectly beautiful Saturday designing splash screens and icons).
The apps will have the UHub breaking-news goodness you'd expect, but also stuff like restaurant and store listings and reviews, all searchable and mappable. To get a rough idea of how that'll work, go to www.locallite.com/search.php and search for something (say, "pizza" in "Boston, MA").
Thanks to suggestions from Kalim Saliba and folks in this discussion, I've set up a UH group on Flickr. Anybody with a Flickr account can join in and post their best Boston-area photos to the group, discuss Boston photography, snort at my photo judgment, etc. As with the universalhub tag, I'll pick photos for highlighting here (if you don't have a Flickr account, but took a cool photo, e-mail me).
I've been thinking (yes, always a dangerous thing) about photos here on Universal Hub.
First, I'm grateful to folks who mark their Flickr photos as "universalhub" or who e-mail me photos. There are some very talented photographers out there, and I'm glad I can highlight your work here. But that gets me to the next point:
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:
[float=right]
[/float]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:
Why?
Three main reasons: In some discussions, there were too many people using the default "anon" as a "name," leading to confusion. As UH has gained more participants, we've picked up more nasty hit-and-run trolls. And we've picked up a new breed of spammers who took advantage of the anonymous posting ability to craft comments that manage to evade the site spam filters (mainly by limiting the number of links in their posts to one or two).
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).
Last update: 5/13/23. Adds information about Google ads.
At Universal Hub, we value your privacy. What follows is a description of how we collect information about you and what we do (or don't do) with it:
You do not need to register to read posts or replies on Universal Hub, or to post replies on the site. However, if you wish to post an article yourself, or if you wish to have the system keep track of messages for you - you will need to create a free account. To do so, you'll be asked for a user name and an e-mail address. Optionally, you can also add additional information that will be displayed to other users who click on your user name at the top of a posting or comment you make. Once you create an account, you can have the system send you e-mail notifications when people reply to your posts or when people post new messages in specific forums.
Universal Hub never makes your address public - although you can let other users contact you, it is done through a "proxy" system on our site - another user fills out a form, which our server then mails to you without revealing your address to the other person.
We do not sell or give out our user names and addresses to anybody. If somebody e-mails us seeking to contact you, we will forward the message to you, leaving it up to you whether to reply.
Universal Hub, Boston Online and Boston Blogs currently use cookies in a couple of different ways:
If you post an article or comment on Universal Hub, or sign up for notification of replies in specific discussions, the software will attempt to put a cookie on your hard drive. This cookie will identify you to the system the next time you connect to it, so that it can tell you which messages are new (i.e., posted since the last time you logged in) and to display them in your preferred form. We do not do anything else with this information.
Universal Hub, Boston Online and Boston Blogs have banner advertising. Some of the advertisers may attempt to write a cookie to your hard drive when you visit their sites.
Similarly, Universal Hub, Boston Online and Boston Blogs employ tracking software from Google Analytics (Universal Hub also has tracking software from Quantcast). These create aggregate reports on the numbers and types of site visitors, but do not track individual users.
If you do not wish to receive a cookie, you can disable them via your browser (each browser has a different way to do this) or with add-on security software. Caveat: Without cookies enabled, you will not be able to have the sites remember your preferences or new-message settings from session to session, i.e., you will have to log in each time.
We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our Web site. These companies may use aggregated information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp.
In addition to the above, our servers collect certain standard "log" information on each visit - the time of the visit, pages seen, type of Web browser, which site, if any, you came to our sites from and your IP address. We do not attempt to create individual user profiles from this information, but do use the data in the aggregate to help determine our audience's interests, popular pages and the like.
If you have any questions about our privacy and cookie polices, please contact Adam Gaffin at [email protected].
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