Ed. note: I'm a member of Local Independent Online News Publishers, which explains the problems with the FCC's upcoming vote on repealing net neutrality - the idea that everybody should have equal access to Internet resources:
Repealing Net Neutrality would allow giant chain media to work in concert with internet conglomerates to limit access to independent, alternative, and local news sites, according to LION Publishers.
I've added back thumbs-up voting for comments. Will watch over the next week to see what that does to site performance.
UPDATE: Server back up.
Poor server's hard drive is showing signs of impending failure, so the Web host is going to take the site down and replace it this afternoon. When they do, the site will be down, for five to ten minutes. Really down, like, not even any messages about gnomes banging on things with their little gnome hammers. My apologies for the interregnum!
I've turned off comment rating for now. I think that system was dragging the rest of the site down, and I figured keeping the site up in general was more important than letting folks vote on comments until I can figure out what is going on (especially since you can't vote anyway if the site's down).
Seems the module that detects mobile devices has gone bonkers today and is showing the mobile version to lots of desktop users. I think I've fixed that (if you're on a desktop and the site has tons of white space and just looks weird, then I haven't, in which case let me know), but the fix has changed the look of the mobile version (which should still be readable, it's mainly that the headline fonts are different and you may not see the ad you usually see at the top of pages, which may be good for you, not so good for me).
Yes, it's taken me forever, but I've finally added a link to the mobile version of UHub that lets you log in. Next up: Figuring out how to do one of those "hamburger" menus.
There's a right-wing troll who is currently sending out follow requests on Twitter with a user name that's remarkably similar to @universalhub (currently: he's substituted an upper-case I for a lower-case L, which on Twitter look identical). Don't accept them. And if you do stumble across the fake feed, don't worry: No, I haven't suddenly turned into a Russophile RWNJ.
This morning, Timothy Theberge wondered why there wasn't a storrowed.com. There is now (currently just redirects to the Storrowed page here).
Anonymous users who post comments no longer have "(User not verified)" after their names or anons. That phrase has always bugged me, if not enough to find it in the code and comment it out, but in working on a non-UHub project using the same software, I discovered a simple checkbox to turn it off.
Alas, it's gone. Sometime this morning, the UHub database went kablooie. Fortunately, I'd made a backup around midnight, so I was able to swap that in, but unfortunately, that means any comments made overnight are now gone. My apologies for that!
The past couple of days, folks had been reporting a completely unformatted home page with no images. I think I've fixed that (for the more technically inclined, the homepage was getting built with links to files on the https version of the site, which doesn't really exist, except as an empty directory), but please let me know. Read more.
Yes, it's there, between the end of the story and the beginning of the comments. I'm trying it out because, to be honest, it pays a lot better than some of the ads I've been running on the right side of the page, so I'm trying it out. There's a "jump to comments" link right before it, and I'm looking to see if I can limit how many times a day you see it. I've also eliminated a couple of the ads that used to run on the right side of stories, so hopefully no effect on page-loading time.
A couple weeks ago, I turned on a caching module to help reduce the number of times UHub went down. It's worked (yay!), but it also seems to have introduced a new problem, at least for people who aren't logged in: Read more.
When you log in now, you'll be taken to the home page, rather than your user-profile page. If you still want to go to your profile page, click on "My Account" at the top of the page.
I'm very pleased to introduce Shelagh Dolan, who will be interning for UHub this summer. One of her main assignments will be covering the Olympics. She's fluent in Spanish, so we've already mapped out a couple of long-term assignments involving the city's Hispanic communities, but if you have any suggestions for stories touching those communities that are going uncovered, let us know!
As a grumpy old editor, naturally the very first thing I had her do was compose her own bio: Read more.
Given the sort of thing that's been happening even here in our quiet little cubbie of the universe, you might be interested in a Ford Hall Forum discussion next week on Vicious Anonymity.
I've reactivated the thumbs on comments, but have made voting stop four weeks after the post they're comments on has been published. Will be watching the server today to make sure they don't crash things again (if they do, will have to turn them off again).
I've turned off the voting on comments while I try to figure out why the site keeps slowing and crashing. There's a database table that's supposed to be used for triggering routine site maintenance, but it's been filling up with hundreds of thousands of items related to the voting system and I want to figure out why before turning it back on.
Well, if they're hosted on YouTube or Vimeo, that is. If you post something, look for the Video header at the top of the article-creation page. Click Select Media, then paste in the URL for the video you want to include and hit Submit. When your post goes live, the video will be at the top.
I got a request today from somebody to have links on Universal Hub open in a new tab or window rather than in the same tab as the UHub page. Less confusing, because it would keep UHub open, she said.
It'd be easy enough to do, but before I make a change like that, I'd want to see what other folks think. A poll should show up below in a second or two:
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
