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photo: disparkys via Flickr
Welcome to a new day; welcome to MyFDL!
Things will look familiar and yet very different; give yourself plenty of time to acquaint yourself with the new bells and whistles, and more time reacquaint yourself with the slightly different location and feel of older tools and resources.
Leave a comment here with any questions or concerns and we’ll try to get to them as quickly as possible.
One of the first exercises I’d like to suggest after logging in and customizing your profile is friending another community member. Then try searching for another favorite community member’s posts. You’ll learn quite bit trying these out on your own.
Above all, have fun with your new MyFDL!
90 Comments
Handsome blog you have here.
Thank you, Rayne.
It most certainly is.
Why yes, it is! Thank you, and thanks to all the techies who worked so diligently behind the scenes to pull this together!
Welcome! and thanks for all the hard work from our Techies, who are great stuff.
Mornin’ folks. Smells like fresh blog.
Awesome job by all the folks who put this together. I’m looking forward to using all of the new features.
Ohhhhh, I’m too old for all this changey stuff. Waaaah. Heh. This should be fun. Writing Caturday this morning is gonna be fun.
Good morning – good work by the whole team!
I think you are going to love it. It will take a little time to get comfy with it, just as all new things do, but pretty soon you are going to be so used to the new, improved editing features that you’ll love it.
Looking forward to that inaugural Caturday post at MyFDL!
Pretty! and Smart, too!
We’d love to have your thoughts on everything here. The major things you’ll notice are:
- threaded comments on MyFDL diaries
- Different look and way of writing diaries
- connecting with other FDL readers
That’s the bulk of what we have here, but we want all thoughts and comments. Thanks all!
I noticed that when I first wrote my comment there was no flag icon. What’s the flag/unflag for?
New toys!
Nested comments! Yay!
The flag is for indicating content which is inappropriate. You can’t rate your own content as inappropriate so you won’t see a flag.
Sometimes readers are much faster at seeing objectionable material than the team behind the scenes (they have to watch all the FDL sites at the same time, after all).
Readers should use the flag sparingly and only for the most egregious of remarks, the kind should get moderated.
Having been through a similar process I know how much work all of you have put in for ages.
Congratulations on a job well done
markfromireland
Truly awesome job. This is just gorgeous. What a wonderful thing to wake up to!
Many thanks to everyone who has been working so hard to put this together — especially those who are probably dragging right now from lack of sleep.
Fun Fun!
Ah so, desu ka.
I can’t open up Lisa Derrick’s post on Cannabis Soda.
When I click “read more” from the myFDL homepage or from LaFiga homepage, it just goes back to the default FDL homepage.
Will do :-)
My first suggestion is a set of buttons at the top of this form for the most common editing functions for comments.
My second is that you might want to create one or two pages. Showing people how to use the new writing functions. Thrilled you’ve used the “paste from word” which will make it easier for people to write posts while seamlessly stripping the crud that word puts in. – This one is very popular with our users.
Third: Add “Link” button for inserting links in postings.
Fourth: Add image insertion button.
Those are my first thoughts.
Once again well done to all concerned.
markfromireland
I think I need road map. This is going to be fun – soon.
Test
A great upgrade: Thanks and congratulations.
What did I do wrong that my comment doesn’t show “add friend?”
Same thing with any of the recent TBogg posts. I try to open them but only get sent back to the FDL homepage.
I’m giving it a whirl. Anyone want to be friends? I have to go to my weekday computer to get a photo, none on the computer here at Little Momma’s and I’m not gonna add any.
Looks fantastic. Congrats!
this was happening to me too over at ew’s. after i logged on and filled in some info on my profile, i went back to ew’s and clicked on a post and got sent to the correct page.
(hmmm…no “preview” for nested comments?)
How does the add a friend work feature work? This should be very interesting.
Check your Friends now or look at your Notifications in the blue bar at the top. You should see that you’ve had a friend request accepted.
Using the Friends tab will give you quick access to your peeps.
and if you use the pull down menu at “My Account” you get to “Settings” and from there to “Notifications”
there you can set it so you get emails for notifications
Morning everyone! looks great.
Hey, thanks Rayne. And they say old hippies can’t learn new tricks.
Thanks. It’s nice to have a friend. Would you be so kind as to check my username on the friends list to make sure I did it correctly. It still shows no green plus symbol and the word friend in the box. Appreciated.
btw, I’m not a social systems user, if I goof something up, I love you all anyway.
Thanks to everyone who worked on this. I’m sure there’s a ton of work that went on behind the scenes to make this happen. Congrats on having a smooth roll-out.
A couple of comments:
1) I like how « is used to get a permalink to a comment. It’s a nice design element.
2) It would be nice to have a Preview button when writing comments.
3) I think most people will wonder what the flag is for. Also, a grey pole on the flag would fit in better to the color scheme.
4) It would be nice if the blue bar at the top of the screen was lighter – maybe the same color as the lighter half of the bar that appears on each comment. The top bar is noticeable, but it’s also a bit distracting when reading.
Hooray!!!! Indents for conversations; fantastic!
Thanks for everything, Jane, Rayne, and Techhies!
Hooray for the threaded comments. It means conversations can happen; it’s grand! Thank you so much.
Just a ‘second’ — very handsome, indeed!
BTW: I just clicked the BlueAmerica link and it did not work for me. FYI.
“The worst part?” Home Ownership is an American Nightmare, not the American Dream… Smile :-)
Sorry if off topic… Smile :-)
Well it worked on my end. ;-)
How do I embed, not link to, a pic in my diary text?
You can’t break anything, Ruth, no sharp objects provided.
And eventually you’ll get the hang of the friends thing. Have a teenager show you, always works for me.
Got it figgered out. Thanks.
Oh, dear, something new to learn. More opportunities to be rejected by a requested “friend,” — okay, done with geezer-whining.
No, really, it’s very nice.
Looking for Caturday – but guessing maybe it isn’t up yet. Even SD has to learn the new system?
Question- can we use an avatar, or gravatar instead of a pic? As long as I’m looking for a job and taking various temp assignments, I need to remain anonymous. Besides which, I don’t have recent pix in digital form to use, except my ugly-ish Facebook one.
So, now I need a lesson in how to safely get a gravatar, I guess, if they’re allowed.
How do I get rid of the diaries that show up when I open my “page”? They’re all on stuff I have no interest in.
It be up now, I hopz.
Speaking of ends, I regret being a pain in the butt, but where I clicked on your add a friend it now says cancel friendship :<}
Did you click on MyFDL or on the “My Diary” icon in the Tool Box at right?
You won’t be able to change the main MyFDL page just as you couldn’t in the older Seminal.
“My Diary” should be posts you wrote; they will scroll off as you continue to add more posts.
Heh. I do not take the Friend thing personally. (I’m a very bad Facebook user, too.) Probably best not to think of the Friend tool as a personal slight or affirmation, just an easier way to find content by people whose opinion you trust.
As for the gravatar versus photo: hell yes. I won’t have my photo up either. I’ve got enough hassle now without people running into me and saying, “Wow, you don’t look anything like your photo” when I’m in the store trying to shop and I’m in my sweats sans makeup.
Yes, it’s up, and thank you much!
See http://my.firedoglake.com/southerndragon/2010/10/24/caturday-34/ for the inaugural MyFDL Caturday post!
Having a description pop up if you hover over the flag icon would help people understand what it’s for.
I think it was jeffroby who commented elsewhere (where it may be missed) that having some way to identify (or find) new comments in a thread would be useful. When I first began blogging the linear format really bugged me and I much preferred a ‘forum’ response format, but FDL’s back-links (‘show text’, ‘hide text’) really seemed to work well at allowing conversations to occur while preserving the linearity (so that you could simply read on from where you had left off after taking a break and not miss anything).
I have no idea how much work it would take to allow one to choose between the old (linear) format and the new one when viewing comments, but if it were easy it might be a good option (especially if some means of identifying what new comments have appeared since the page was last refreshed can’t be created).
NOTE:
This introductory post will be disappearing shortly, and regular rotation of Food Sunday posts will move up. If you have comments attached to this original introduction, they will be hidden with the original post when it is pulled back to the closet, so to speak. This original is “blocking” flow of new posts onto the front page, sorry!Oops, we didn’t need to pull back the post after all. Phew! So many new bells and whistles!!You may want to try the Site Activity button in the Tool Box to watch comments.
Also watching your Friends’ activity may help you find more recent comments of interest to you personally.
I’ll make a note of the lack of a label on hover-over on the Flag; there’s a bubble for it, but the label is missing, may need a code tweak.
And it’s a pain in the neck to have to look at it all the time, as everything else scrolls under it.
(‘Who ordered this?’ comes to mind.
I didn’t think anything but ‘Spotlight’ was broken or needed fixing.
Grump. grump. grump.)
Nice job! How did Buddypress work out for this? Did you have to do a lot of customization?
Anyway, looking forward to this new platform, TNX!
The Site Activity button is far too short-term to be useful for what I was describing: at least some of us do not remain glued to the monitor on FDL but rather revisit at intervals measured in hours or even days, and have become accustomed to leaving tabs open on conversations of instantaneous interest (which may be unrelated to who our ‘friends’ are) so that we can see what’s transpired during our absence.
So FDL has turned into a facebook wannabe and we have to go through more rigamarole. Ah, “progress”.
I also notice that there is no “edit” feature for comments. Are you sure that’s an improvement?
Question about groups — I see that the GA12 group has 2 members, one of whom is me. How do I find out who else is in my district?
Went to the spanking new MyFDLDiary page. There’s now a thing called a Dashboard. What’s that? Went to Screen Options and Help. Nothing opened under either. The refresh button also didn’t work and I had to click MyFDL to return to the main page. Well, I guess the good news is that I can still post comments.
The new features are really sweet. Good job!
Maybe I’m an idiot but how do I make a friend request?
Oops. Never mind. Just figured it out.
Just want to say that the site looks great, and I am already a BIG FAN of the implementation of nested replies to comments. I had been hoping that FDL would make such a change, and am very happy to see that day has arrived. Kudos to the technical staff on a great job.
I like this Jane. Kudos to your team. :)
I uploaded an picture to MyFDL; does that replace my avatar?
No. This is not a wannabe. We will not violate your privacy, for starters.
The social media features were implemented to allow users to have more flexibility in reaching out to each other as FDL community members, and to help them with organizing in their own state and congressional district. Could somebody do that with Facebook? sure — but you now have the ability to reach out to a lot more folks who you already know and many of whom share the same political ideologies. And you can do it with ready access to content supporting those ideologies.
BTW, I personally hate Facebook. Detest it.
If you do not have access to that feature now, you will in the near future.
Please understand this was a massive task and many layers of extra complexity may not be fully functional just yet.
Dashboard is your main control panel to all of your own content as well as the place where you can not only manage your own posts, you can add a new post (see Posts at left side of Dashboard, click drop down and select Add New to launch an editing window).
Screen options may be a feature which is not turned on for certain levels of users just yet (believe me, you aren’t missing anything).
Click on the congressional district icon to expand — the icon may be a picture of the representative for that district.
For states, click on the image of the state to expand and find others who’ve joined the state group.
thankyou very mucb.
Yup! it certainly does. Nice to see you!
You may want to continue your practice, then. This site moves rather quickly and may get faster as the site grows and activity increases.
Do old diaries ever die? Or do they continue on forever in a zombie-like existence? I went to my new FDL place and found mutterings I was guilty of back in February.
Rayne, all others involved in this new upgrade, it’s great!
I’ve used Word Press elsewhere and it’s a DELIGHT!
Rayne, you have email regrding my Food Sunday draft backstage . . .
While we certainly can continue that practice it will not be nearly as useful as it used to be unless we have some way of easily figuring out where the new material can be found (before, we could just continue reading from the location where we left off and be sure of seeing anything new – the browser even maintained that position for us).
A linear blog is not the ONLY way to achieve this, of course. But it would be nice if there were SOME way to achieve it. When comments grow into the hundreds, scanning them visually by date to see what may be new can become a real deterrent to continued interaction.
As I said originally I started off disliking linear blogs, but the FDL approach of combining a back-link to the entry replied to plus the ability to see that entry inserted into the current position by clicking ‘see text’ seemed to combine the best of both worlds (it would be less effective in following an extremely branchy conversation, but it works great for what normally occurs here).
Having abandoned your linear format means that you’re already in the business of rearranging the records in your comment database before displaying them. Offering the option to display them in a second manner (consistent with your old practice) might not require much new code – and if it required undue server overhead it could conceivably be done in Javascript at the client.
Or something much simpler might be feasible, such as being able to highlight posts in a thread later than a particular timestamp to make them easily distinguishable from those previously read.
The bottom line is that you requested comments on the new format. Mine is that this particular feature is, for me, a step backward in terms of FDL’s normal conversational flow (though many seem to like it and my initial reaction was that I did too). Whether you have the inclination and/or the ability to do something to alleviate this loss of function is up to you.
Test reply.
Ah, ok. Now I see how the replies are nested . . . . differenf from before but I’ve frequented blogs who do all kinds of things.
No issue for me, I’ll adapt . . . . So far Rayne, looks great and as I said elsewhere I LOVE the Word Press system. I PARTICULARLY like being ble to find MY diaries much faster, and even have access to my SAVED but not published diaries! Just like admin privileges! Way kewl feature.
Agree with your every suggestion . . . have used those things at other blogs and for comments its WAY kewl . . . wonder how much more server space and costs all that incurs?
It means you’re already accepted. ;-)
Shhhh…we won’t tell anybody about the muttering if you don’t…
You could delete your diaries, I guess, but I personally find that to be a waste of good potential resources. What if somebody in comments said something profound and important in response to your mutterings?
How about some sort of international News desk/dump?
Also, a request: Can you please review the reason(s) why I’m being chaperoned, and help get that leash off of me?
billtodd — am replying to your 3:26 comment here as the nesting seems to end at a certain point.
This upgrade was a massive undertaking, designed to meet a number of needs including allowing users to interact more with each other and enable their organizing efforts at a more local level. It also resolved a number of other issues like the problems many users at The Seminal had with formatting.
While there will be tinkering for additional customization and re-addition of a few features, the linear format will probably not come back. We had a sizable population of users who asked for the nested format, and that’s what we have today.
Please keep in mind this is a community which pushes the envelope on the capabilities of community blogging platforms; not every feature will be an option for a group this size simply because we are way out in front and the applications have not yet caught up to us.
And yes, money is an issue, too; it always is for an organization which relies heavily on donations for its operations. Given the large number of priorities on the plate at any given time and the need for triage combined with technical limits, well, there will only be so much which can be provided.
I agree. I like the indented comments so I can see who’s talkin’ to who.
Great job!
Er…it’s a bit hard for me to read the grey font; could it be a bit more toward black?
I love the nested comments. For those who don’t like it, may I link to a blog/diary from MyTPM that shows how grand it is can be to get complex conversations and myriad comments on a thread?
One difference is that the TPM threads had pretty much its own page when you accessed it, but still…
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/w/e/wendy_davis/2010/05/will-someone-please-tell-mewha.php?ref=reccafe
This one had 168 comments; some could generate up to 300. It was great, especially when threads would draw in lurkers.
Back after a day away and I am impressed with the changes. Will explore a bit before I might understand enough to offer an opinion.
And just after my teen tried showing me how to use an Apple product today.
Am I the only one regularly visiting FDL who is still on dial-up?
I’m pretty sure we have a number of users who are still on dial-up. Hope the pages load quickly for you.