But since we’re talking about it, might as well point out some of the changes:
- open comments (yes registration free anonymous comments are back!)
- massively reduced page weight for faster load times
- higher content to ad ratio
- less space for ads overall
- easier to understand self-serve ads
- return of the blogrolls
- and more!

Hope you enjoy, and expect more fun soon!

Behind the scenes here there is so much being worked on and I’m really excited to launch something we’ve been working on for a few months in one form or another. After reading Emergency and spending some time really looking into a lot of the issues it brought up, Jason and I realized that most of the “survival” info that was out there was focused on being in the wilderness or jam packed with “The Dems are in the white house now, clearly the country is going to fall apart any moment, let’s all buy ammo and pray until that happens.” Not that there is anything inherently wrong with either of those approaches, but they just aren’t very appealing to me as someone who lives and frequents major cities the majority of my time.

Due to this, we felt there should be a site with a strong focus on big city survival and disaster prep. With Metblogs we’ve seen a lot of things happen out of no where in our cities and seen what people had to deal with through their own eyes. This often made us think of how we would have responded if we were in that situation and more often than not we would have been very unprepared. So today we’re launching Urban Journal – a site that will both chronicle our own journey to become more prepared as well as provide useful info and tips for other city dwellers who don’t want to be caught by surprise. It’s a little bit of a different direction for us at Bode Media but we’re excited about it and looking forward to seeing where it leads. Hope you enjoy it!

If you look on the individual post page for any entry on any city Metblogs site, just above the comments you’ll see a simple line of code you can copy and paste into an entry on your own website or blog.

You can see this in action on this test on my own personal blog. Pretty cool eh?

This is super Beta at the moment, and we don’t know how it’ll work under stress or if we overlooked any bits, but as far as we can tell it’s working and we’d like to invite anyone who wants to to go ahead and try it out. If you find any problems with it, please let us know and we’ll try to fix them right away. This is really exciting for us as we think this is the first time a feature like this has been offered online, and should be a fun way for people to bring conversations from Metblogs that they find interesting back to their own sites, while still keeping a single cohesive comment thread on the main post. Enjoy!

Feel free to leave support comments directly on the site as well as on this thread on the hub.

hub.metblogs.com

Feel free to look around, post stuff, check out things other people have posted, join a group or create your own, link up to other folks, or whatever else you figure out that you can do with it. We’ll be linking it from all the cities very soon, so in the mean time this is kind of early adopter news. Enjoy!