Welcome to the new @U2!

We're thrilled that you're seeing our new site today. We have our fingers crossed that you enjoy what you see and what you'll discover in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. There are a lot of changes in place, many of which are behind-the-scenes and will help us run the site more efficiently. (We've moved to a new server that's faster and more stable, for one.) But there are a lot of changes on the public side, too - stuff that you can see. To help you get comfortable in the new surroundings, here's a guide to what's new.

Home Page

1) Bits & Bytes items are now archived permanently. They'll still only show up on the home page for a week or two, but you'll be able to access them forever in the News section of @U2. (More on that below.) This is probably the number one request we've had from readers over the years, and we're glad it's finally in place.

2) Since B&B items are archived, each one now has a permalink -- a URL that you can share with friends, that you can link to, that you can post on Facebook or Twitter, etc. To see the URL, just move your mouse over the headline on our home page. It'll turn red and you can right-click on it to get the URL ... or you can click the headline to go to the archived page and copy the URL from your browser's address bar.

3) On the right side of the home page, we've added a box showing the most recent five posts from our blog. As new blog posts are published, this box will update automatically. (You'll see this box across the whole site, not just the home page.)

News

1) The full text of our 5,000+ news article database is now fully searchable -- text and all. On the old site, you could only search for words appearing in the headline, source, and author fields. If a name or word was mentioned only in the body of an article, you'd never find it via the search form. On our new site, you will.

Try it yourself: Go to the News page and use the search right in the middle there. Type "pavarotti" into the box and hit the SEARCH button. You'll get a complete list of every story in our database that mentions Pavarotti, not just the few where he's mentioned in the headline. This has been a long-time goal of mine, and took up a good portion of the development time this summer. I'm not sure everyone will appreciate this at first, but I hope you do someday. It's like having your own U2-only version of Google. :-)

2) When using the search form, you'll notice several options to help you locate exactly what you want. Right after the text box, there's a new dropdown where you can choose All, Headlines, Source, Author, or Date. Go back and do the same search for "pavarotti," but this time use the dropdown to choose AUTHOR and then hit SEARCH. You won't get any results because we don't have any articles written by authors named Pavarotti. But change the name to "mccormick" and you'll get everything in our database written by Neil McCormick (and anyone else named McCormick).

3) On that same dropdown, the "Date" option is interesting and fun. You can search for news articles from an exact date by using any of these formats:

6/14/2009
6/14/09
June 14, 2009
14 Jun 2009
14 June 2009
20090614
2009-06-14
2009-6-14
6-14-09
6-14-2009

And check this out: type in "4 weeks ago last tuesday" (without the quotes), choose DATE from the dropdown, and hit SEARCH. You should see all the articles we posted on June 30 ... which was four weeks ago from last Tuesday. :-) Pretty cool, eh?

4) I promised more info about the Bits & Bytes archives, and here it is: Bits & Bytes is now one of the categories in our news database. To access the B&B archives, leave the search form blank and just choose "Bits & Bytes" from the "Select a Category" dropdown. Hit the SEARCH button and you'll have access to all of the saved B&B items. I should mention that we've only just now started archiving these. We've added a couple B&B items dating back to June 30, but beyond that, the archiving begins now. (Older B&B items are archived in our atu2 news mailing list.)

5) The things we post as Bits & Bytes are now included in our RSS feed. This is probably the second most-requested feature you've made over the years.

6) On news articles, the URLs are now written to match the story headline. This will give you a better idea of what the story is about when you first see the URL. For example, an old URL like this,

http://www.atu2.com/news/article.src?ID=5602

has been replaced by this:

http://hanover.atu2.com/news/croke-park-protests-called-off.html

You get a better idea of the story content before you click to read it.

7) Our news database (and the entire site, for the most part) supports much larger images. See this example. The image you see is larger on the page, and you can click, in this case, for a really large version of that image.

8) At the bottom of some news articles, you'll see a link to an existing discussion about the topic in our forum.

Lyrics

1) Ian Ryan, our lyrics guru, has added a new section of lyrics to U2 promos. This goes along with the existing sections on Albums, EPs, Singles, and Videos.

2) We've also created a new page, All U2 Releases, which shows all five types of releases on a single page. This'll be helpful if you're looking for lyrics and you know what the cover looked like, but you don't know the name of the song.

3) On our Alphabetical List of U2 Lyrics page, we've added quick links at the top of the page. Click the "M" and you'll immediately scroll down to the songs that start with M. This is the probably the third most-requested feature you've made in recent years.

Photos

We've essentially relocated our Photos section to Flickr, and we're now pulling those photos back in to @U2 as slideshows. You'll see what I mean when you check out any of the photo pages. We'll be adding more photos to Flickr in the future, too.

Design

Did I forget to mention that we have a new design? You've obviously seen that by now. We have a new masthead with three links that will change occasionally. The Soundbyte quote will always appear in the upper right of every page. The navigation menu is now horizontal across the top of the page, right below the logo. (There's also a menu dropdown at the bottom of every page, just like on the old site.) And the design, as a whole, gives us more space to present all the U2 news, info, and content you love.

There are a couple other minor updates and changes here and there, but we'll let you discover them on your own.

One last thing...

This is a BIG web site, and we've done our best to check and test as much as possible. But still, it's very likely that you'll run into some bugs or mistakes or strange-looking pages. If you find something that doesn't make sense or doesn't look right, go ahead and have a chuckle at our expense, but then please let us know what you found and where so we can try to fix it ASAP.

Thank you for reading this - please enjoy the new site!

Matt McGee