Universal Hub

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.

Ron Welby is our new go-to guy for your Boston-based online ad needs (both here and across the Boston Blogs Network. Ron is an online veteran from way back, with stints at Belo Communications in New England and GateHouse Media, so if you run a business, he knows how to help you grow it by reaching the best Boston audience anywhere (proof and more proof).

You can reach Ron at rwelby@universalhub.com.

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).

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:

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).