There's a lot of traffic to UHub today; I've turned off comment rating to reduce some of the load on the database. My apologies!

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!

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.