Ok, I admit that I am not a writer and I am no good at keeping
my site up to date. So I apologize for delay in between each of my
updates.
Unfortunately last week's progress was a bit slow as much of the work we
did was on the underlying structure for JoeUser. So there is not too much to
report so I will also recap a few things that were done the week before.
Create your own Blog
This is just a recap for anyone
who may have missed Brad's announcement. JoeUser.com allows for you to
create your own free blog site. It's very simply and fast to do. If
you have not created an account already you must do that first. After you
have completed the process of creating an account and have logged on to joeuser.com, visit the
"Account" page. (The link is located at the very top of the page in the
Tab section). On the Account Page you should find a link to "Create your own
JoeUser.com Blog". Click there and enter the name of your blog. That's
it. You're done. So if you selected the name "deltaforce"
then JoeUser would have automatically create the site http://deltaforce.joeuser.com for you.
Private Groups
This was just added over the weekend. What are Private Groups
you ask? Private Groups allow you to post an article and specify who you
want to be able to view it. By default your articles are public for
everyone to see. But lets say you wanted to do a family news letter and
only wanted family members to view your article and not display it to the whole world. You would create the group
"Family" and then enter all your family members into that group. After
the group has been completed and you go to create a new Article you will
now have the option to either allow "Everyone" to view your article or
just your "Family" group. You could create a group with just yourself as
being the only person in it, which then would be great for being able to post
your own Diary entries.
Point System
A point system has been put in place where every site, article and user will gain
points in various ways. A user can gain points by posting articles,
replies and by having their own worked rated. And an article gains points
by how many views it receives, each reply to it and if the article is
rated. We will use this point system to show you lists of the top rated
articles and users.
The point system is still under development and will most likely require
tweaking as we go along but in most part it is functional and working. Some
time in the near future we will create a more comprehensive document that
explains all the parts of the points system.
Top Articles & Users
With the point system now in place we have the ability to track the most
popular Blog Sites, Articles and Users. As you probably have already seen
we now have sections in the right bar of JoeUser.com that displays the Top 5-10
entries for each category.
Watch List
The watch list has actually been around for a couple of weeks but we really
have not talked about it before now. If you see an article that you are
really interested in and wish to follow it as other people comment on the
article then you can enter the article into your Watch List. When an
article is in your watch list and it receives a new reply and Email will be
sent to you informing you that there has been new replies to the article since
you last read it. This can be a very useful feature and save you time
from having to check back periodically on an article to see if anything
new has been posted to it.
To add an article to your Watch List just click on the magnifying glass icon
that is on the top of each article. To view or delete articles from your
watch list click on the "Track
Watch List" that is in the Login Toolbar.
Blog Groups (Coming soon)
Coming up in the next day or two you will have the ability to create a
Blog Group. Blog Group's are simply a group of blog sites joined together
to create a single site based on the content of all the sites that belong to
the group. Let's say there are several bloggers who are all interested in
auto racing. You could create the site autoracing.joeuser.com and it
would combine articles from each of your sites creating a common ground for
anyone interested in auto racing to visit.
