Dissapointing Experience at YourHub.com

My first experience with YourHub.com was very disappointing. I reformulated a post from this blog about the Obey Obama poster as it seemed the most newsworthy and probably the most interesting to the YourHub community. After beefing up the post in Microsoft Word to meet the 500 word requirement I ventured over to YourHub to register. The first problem came on the homepage when I was trying to get to the Boulder section of YourHub. I selected Colorado from the drop down and as soon I attempted to click away and go to the region selection drop down, I was greeted with a browser generated 'Syntax Error' message. This prohibited me from getting to the Boulder section of YourHub. Only after some tricky back door address shenanigans from our teacher, was the class able to get to the Boulder section. If I hadn't needed to make a post for class I would have left after this initial error and never come back.

Registering was pretty straight forward. Although discomforting for some, I think that the requirement to put in my entire address made sense as YourHub can be a site where controversial content must be traced and controlled. The next problem came when attempting to put image links into my news story. First, I simply copied the blogger image html and on preview noticed that it was not translating to an image. I went back and simplified using the standard 'img src' code. When this did not translate to an image in preview I became very frustrated. I used their recommended 'classic' image uploader that allowed me to write captions and give credit. This system worked alright but the inability to dictate where my images fall in relation to text seemed to be a huge restraint as I believe a key journalistic function of any website should be to carry readers on a textual and image based pathway of your choosing down the page.

The most disappointing problem with YourHub was its inability to translate basic 'a href' links. I wanted to point people to both the NY Times article and the Obey website but was instead greeted with HTML code translated visibly to my post. Whatever YourHub's reasoning is that they don't accommodate basic HTML links, it is unacceptable. The essence of the internet is the ability to link people away from your site to further info. Google sees links to and from sites as a pivotal criteria for a respectable website and hundreds of thousands of publishing systems including Blogger, Wikipedia and nearly all forums respect the ability to dictate linking. Even if YourHub doesn't want you directing people elsewhere they should at least have a system that sees alligator brackets and cancels them from the final posting. This was immensely frustrating, so frustrating that I left the link codes in my post and will never go back unless forced to.