If Metblogs is a city, hub.metblogs is the playground. We kept hearing from people that one of their favorite parts of Metblogs was meeting and interacting with readers and writers from other parts of the world, as well as getting requests for more ways that readers could be involved besides just posting comments. We thought about this for a while and decided that with a network like this, a giant community area where folks from all over the world could hang out, post photos and videos, talk with each other, form groups, play games, send messages, and do about a million other things was probably a pretty fun idea. The Hub is that.

If you have any tech ideas or suggestions join this group and speak up. See you on hub.metblogs!

Where’d everybody go? We have a few new faithful commenters, but we’ve lost droves more.  Sad! Come back, register, post comments. We hate the new system too (I haven’t checked in with U and E and I hate speaking for others, but I’m going to exercise some Captain discretion and take a leap).  It’s not our favorite.

 Thing is: there’s an incredible amount of diversity in the Metroblogging network - not just cultural-by-country, but cultural-by-tech.  By that I mean, the people who engineer this network (whom I love) come at things from a web-tech driven perspective. Others of us - say - me - come at this from a writer perspective. I love my town. I love writing about it. This site is a tool, it’s not an end or a shiny toy to me. Maybe it is or it isn’t to you. But don’t let the tech stuff scare you off. The premise and goal are the same.

We’re working on getting up to speed. You’ve no doubt noted that even some of our authors are still absent. They’re working on it too.

We’ve had questions about the dearth of photos. They’ll come back - promise! Spring and better light is here.

But hang out a bit more. We’ve always been a baby-city in MB land. We don’t want the platform change to kill us off completely. We need  your help to stay alive.

Argh: I’ve been blogging for nearly 5 years now. You’d think I’d know by now that bloggers kill nuance. They revel in irony, yet they also can’t stand it. You may have noted that I have added a link to the term “hyperbole” several places above. No, we don’t HATE anything around here. We’re frustrated. We fear change. We’re hometown-boosting-blog-post-writing-nerds, y’all. Duh. So, for reals, what we want is for people to take the time to register, to realize, then, that it’s not an arduous process, and to rejoin the party.  We miss you. In the words of the immortal Take That, we want you back for good.

You hardly need me to point it out, but there have been some changes around here. We’ve got more renovations than a Saturday afternoon TLC marathon block of Flip That House.  We invite you to poke around and kick the tires a bit. There are some new features here and some more on the way. Some stuff works and some stuff still has kinks to work out. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think of the new layout and if you happen to find anything broken.  (Tip: we do know that some archives pages are throwing up 404s and we’re on it - but if you see other stuff, let us know!)

 Thanks for reading!

 P.S. to leave comments you’ll need to register. It takes just a few seconds and won’t result in spam or anything ugly like that. We love your input so please do take the time to register.