It’s time for a little retrospective. The site has been live since approximately 10:30PM EST Sunday night.
We just passed 340 registered users. The site has had 112,021 hits in less than 6 days.
We have added a RSS feed, moved the regional threads so that the West is on the left, added links at the bottom of diaries so you can pop back up to the top of the thread or the top of the diary.
Plus a few other things. There is a suggestion box diary. Please use your brains to come up with ideas to make the site even better.
Looking very good. I found you – and registered on Monday. Registrations and postings increase at a surprising speed.
And you’re lucky to already have many great diarists here that many (most?) of us recognize from Kos.
I predict a bright future for this endeavour.
Good luck.
Oh, and what’s the Frist/First-rule here (not that I would ever do such a thing).
Maybe you also have some statistics to share? Have you had a chance to analyze your traffic so far?
we are operating under Pastor Dan’s dKos community guide (in the FAQ).
I don’t know if Dan touched on that there or not.
I like the new touches– new categories of diaries, etc. It’s a smaller pond where excellent diaries will have more time to shine. My only problem is figuring out when to find time to read both this AND Kos! Nice work, BooMan et al.
It’s a clean, well lit place.
I’ve always liked the ambiance of the Scoop environment. The added bonus here appears to me to be the quality of the diaries, without having to hack through so much detritus.
After writing elsewhere for a long period I am now without a master, and in the short time this site has been open I’ve found it to be very comfortable. It’s a good place to write.
I only got a couple of minor points. One is when I hit double return, I thought I’d have automatic line breaks when I put up my diary, but it didn’t. The other is there a chance for a hotlist?
from someone who has been at dKos for so long. But I never used the hotlist feature.
What exactly are its advantages?
To bookmak diaries that you want to come back to, for whatever reason. Busy now, read later – or for future reference.
it just creates a little folder?
It also tracks replies to your comments in the same box, doesn’t it?
I mostly use to see if the writers I “subscribe” to have posted any diaries and if there’s any replies to my comments (although that feature doesn’t always work). It is possible that you’ve never seen the hotlist because it works and looks differently on my PC with IE than it does on my iBook with IE. The PC version has all the features where as the Mac version just sometimes has a list of diaries I’d posted in (although that doesn’t always come up on my Mac).
On dKos, I noticed that it says something about “click on the plus sign next to the title” to add to my hotlist, but there’s no plus sign there! I guess that’s just a mac thing…I just discovered how the subscribe/hotlist feature works earlier this week. Pretty cool.
Top left in every diary is a little circle with a + mark in it (changing to a – if you click it).
Any diary for which you clicked a + will appear on a separate page if you click “Hotlist” (rather, this page will list the links to all these diaries). The page will also list your subscriptions and unread replies to any of your comments. Quite useful.
I never bothered with it.
I’ll look into it as a tool for this site.
I’m loving the site even without it. it’s just something I find handy at times.
but I am finding Kos a little slow, ponderous, and non-user friendly all of a sudden.
This site seems easier to navigate. Which is kick-ass.
Are you enjoying your site? Are you having fun?
and go back to follow threads that sometimes drop off the list a dKos. Right now the site is small enough that I don’t lose diaries.
I’ve found dKos to be really slow these days on loading.
Best parts of navel gazing – I Love the Green! Also breaking the diaries in to World and Other is cool.
Regional open threads are cool – and I’ve checked out other than West just to see what’s going on…
Love the site BooMan – I’m actually thinking about writing my first diary here!
Now would that be an innie or an outie that we’re talkin bout here?
Seems everything here has gone very smoothly so far, no major glitches that I’m aware of.
I’ve taken to calling the geographical boxes ..going to go check out the ‘Front Porch’.
Glad to be here from the start of your baby Booman. Something like this must be a pretty huge undertaking, so Congrats, break out the champagne and I hope this is a rousing success for you and everyone who helped you put this together..for all of us.
Actually, I just wanted to see if I could post images…
so you can post images. Can you make GIANT PASTEL BOXES?
I think you ARE gaelic
and that’s ok!
She’s baaaaaaaaack. (Do you feel better? Can we stand closer now?)
And I’m glad to see that we’re launching a blog, not ships.
Oh. I thought that said “Garlic” and I was like WTF??
Only if you live in Gilroy-isn’t that the garlic capitol of the world(self described)..where they have such stuff as garlic ice cream? Can’t quite see anyone having a hankering for garlic ice cream but ya never know.
ewww…interesting yet repulsive at the same time…
These old eyes like the bigger print than what Old Kos has got.
And the “front porch”, World diaries…
Like it all, except being html dumb, I can’t figure how to post pictures, damnmit, MSOC.
I also would appreciate a hotlist. I use it a lot at Kos to make sure I don’t miss my favorite writers. Not a huge problem here yet, as diaries stay up longer, but I am sure that will change in a short while.
Congrats, you should be feeling all warm and fuzzy.
Ok, so I screwed around with my dKos extension, and it made a liar of me. Photoposting for Dummies. Yay!
OH ME TOO! The big print is SO NICE! I don’t have to take off my glasses and squint up close to the monitor. Bless you, Boo.
I’ve been lovin’ the big print too, but didn’t want to say it. Afraid I might be, uh, you know, aging!
Gosh… I didn’t realize my presence was an “honor”. I’m just a regular, ordinary person, half senile sometimes. I realized I’ve gotten the date wrong on my posts for the past 3 days in a row over at my blog… đŸ™‚
It feels good to be welcomed here though.. I’ve had some personal problems (of the offline kind) and I could use with a dose of kindness now and then.
I saw in another thread that people were asking what the difference between user numbers here and at DKos are. I’ m 285 here and 340 over there so it’s not much đŸ™‚
By the way, I like seeing that (RO) next to my name in the Diaries!
Pax
But we wouldn’t be doing it up right without a Friday Cat Blogging picture!
is a most excellent kitty pic. Thank you so much.
about a week or two ago. It has it all.
How did you get a gmail email account?
Go here:
http://isnoop.net/gmailomatic.php
I have some invites last time I looked…
drop me at line at my hotmail account…that’s the one I use publicly…
llamg88 at hotmail.com
I followed chi mai’s link and was able to get one. It must be popular, I couldn’t get sgilman or shawn.gilman. I really liked one of the alternatives they suggested – gilmanator.
feel free to ask me at my gmail account thor.heyerdahl@gmail.com I’ve got a bunch
Just came on over here – it’s GREAT! Seeing a lot of excellent writers over here, too.
Good job.
I flipped the regional threads to make them map-accurate. I hope that’s okay.
We’ll have the hotlist installed today.
And, I changed the title of the World Open thread to World/Open, because tbat is where you should post comments for everyone, not just your region.
I would love for diaries to come “tagged” with a generic topic. It would be a great way to filter the noise a bit (not that there’s noise yet, but there will be right?)
Maybe add a dropbox with 5-10 generic topics like: [news story, education, local politics, state politics, national politics, culture, meta, other…]
before diaries hit the board, a choice would need to be made, and the topic would preface the diary title when it appeared in the front page list (i.e. [EDUCATION: NCLB blows donkey nuts]… these titles would be pretty generic, but useful in that people could filter on the diary page – might help find related stories, and cut back on duplicate diaries etc…
that said, I have NO idea how much programming this would take…
btw… if you’ve read this far, I got into Berkeley’s MBA program last night and I wanted to tell someone… getting in to non-profit management program. yay new career path!
I meant to reply to you, instead I posted to the top. Congrats on the MBA program.
Do you already work in Non-profits? I’ve spent a number of years in management of Non-profits (including current).
Not-for-profits are so rewarding – a little behind the times technologically but cool.
actually, it’s a career change for me. My current job keeps me away from my volunteer gigs too often. This is my attempt to get paid to do a much more rewarding job…
Feel free to email if you would like to chat about not-for-profits big or small.
I’ve always wanted to suggest some kind of a ‘sort by topic’, but have no idea if it’s easy or asking the near impossible.
I love the spellcheck! Any chance of it suggesting possible correct spellings?
(And congratulations Abbott on Berkeley. Sounds wonderful!)
There are a lot of different ways to go with this, but Scoop has a sections feature that we could play around with.
Instead of being in the title, you might be able to just go to the Education section and see all the diaries on a special page. Meanwhile on the FP they would all be mixed together.
I’ll look into it.
…thanks to SusanHu.
Looks great!
is a buddy magnet. Welcome to the site.
Thanks!
I hope this isn’t too big. If it is, I’ll removei it. So cute.
That one’s pretty high an the awwwww! scale
Snuggly is always good!
Booman – I’ve been hot listing your dKos diaries forever but admit I haven’t read all of them completely. I’ve also bookmarked many of your comments. Have to admit, I haven’t read all of them completely either, but when I need insight on a particular subject I always check to see if you’ve written anything.
So when I saw your diary the other nite linking to your new home I immediately signed up and bookmarked your site, but, as usual, haven’t read much.
One of these days life will become a little less frenzied and I will be able to pour myself a cocktail, sit back, and indulge myself in another excellent resource.
One question…I see Maryscott plays here so does that mean my foul mouth won’t be troll rated into oblivion?
Again, great place you’ve got here.
Yes Maryscott does play here. And you correctly surmised what that means for the language police.
So, far we haven’t had any trolls at all. And no bitching, or flame wars either.
It’s been smooth sailing.
I’ve tried to keep my language toned down here. Just so happens that I tend to talk like a drunken sailor without the slurring usually.
I figured if I wrote like I talked that might be too distracting for some people. My language is never directed at people but used as descriptive punctuation or well just because.
Look Ma-no cussing here today and it only hurt a little bit.
Okay. I’ve gazed at my navel. Now what?
Oh, btw, 50,000 of those hits were from me.
I’ve also been one of the regular readers of your posts at DKos. Thanks for the hard work in getting this site together. I’m looking forward to interacting with everyone and hearing your writing voices.
With the site layout, I like the colors and the regional threads (thanks for flipping them to match geographically). That’s all, cya around.
Boo…I’m glad I stumbled upon this site a couple of days ago. Should be interesting times here.
I do have an observation though…about font sizes in the text of the diaries. When I am not logged into the site and open up a diary that goes into the extended text box, teh font size of the text is all the same. But when I log in and view that same diary, the text in the extended text part is smaller than the first part of the diary. I am on a mac, but I have tested this with Camino, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer and I’m getting the same thing each time. It’s only when I’m logged in though, that this is happening.
I don’t know if any others are experiencing this, but if they are, reply here and let me know. The different text sizes are kind of distracting and I’m not sure why this is happening either. If others are having this happen to them too, I would advise you, Mr. Boo, to keep all the font sizes the same. It’s easier on the eyes. I can post a screenshot if you need me to, just let me know.
could you do me a favor a just paste that into the Suggestion Box Diary, and we’ll look into it?
Thanks.
My programmer, Andy, is a great guy, but he’ll never find all these tidbits in the different threads.
Thanks again.
Boo.
Just did. I actually saw that suggestion box diary right after I posted this comment. Keep up the good work!
You might consider bumping letters up. One my computer they are the same size as the updates, and as time goes by when scrolling down front page titles of Diaries when one begins and the next one begins may become a bit blurry. So my suggesting would be making Diary titles on Front page a little bigger, and keep the update notes the same size..
Do we really need up top, both 1)our name page and @)our name comments….wouldn’t just one…like our page get us everywhere we want to go? Maybe I am missing something. Is is so fast here…makes me happy..so do the people…
my comments in one click.
I also like to be able to see my page in one click.
Thus, we have both.
this site is so fast…will it slow down as time goes by? Is that why Dkos is so slow these days? I love the spell check…you are genius.
but I’m enjoying it now. Tapping foot over at Kos.
It’s lightning fast for me. Maybe it’s your connection?
I am not computer savvy..could something be wrong with my puter going onto kos and not here? With more traffic do sites/blogs take longer? thanks..
Lots of comments make a page slow to load because of all the processing involved. At least that’s my theory. My G3 processor gets overwhelmed, and I end up frustrated.
Thanks…Boo and Kos are the only Blogs I like and go to. So my experience with blogs is limited. What you write makes sense. Thanks again.
It could also be how much RAM you have. 256MB of RAM is going to have some trouble on kos, at least when it comes to threads with a lot of comments on them. I’m running a Powerbook G4 with a processor from about a year and a half ago (1GH) and I was still having trouble with big threads at dkos. I had 256MB of RAM at the time, but I upgraded about a month ago to 1GB of RAM, and now, threads with over 500 comments on them are a piece of cake to read through.
my computer is a Sony Vaio, with windows XP, athlon, also over a year old. it say’s it has 1.53GHZ and 256 mb of ram. Do I need more? Can I buy ram online? GOd I feel like an idiot.
Well, more RAM is good for anyone. On a mac at least, 256MB is not enough. 512MB should be the starting point for anyone with a mac. But Windows…I’m not as familiar with the OS as I am with Mac OS X. I also haven’t used your computer, so I can’t really say what it is exactly you need, but getting more RAM can’t hurt, and will certainly speed things up.
Although, having Windows does open you up to spyware and viruses, which can REALLY slow a computer down. The best bet for you (if that is the case) is for you to search VersionTracker for a spyware removal program, if you don’t have one already. Windows is a pain with security, and that can cause your computer to get bogged down with viruses and spyware. Macs, thankfully, don’t have any spyware or viruses, or any major security issues.
I wish I could be of more help to you, but seeing as I’ve never seen your computer and how it runs, and the little experience with Windows XP that I have, I really can’t say much more than looking into more RAM would be a good idea. Getting RAM is tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing. You have to find the right kind of RAM that is compatible with your computer (at least, that’s what I had to do with my Mac). It’s not a bad idea to research some sites and companies that sell RAM using google or something like that.
Again, sorry I can’t be more helpful. And please don’t feel like an idiot.
Thanks so much for your advice. I will check it out. It didn’t seem to matter until I came over here at BooTrib and discovered how quickly things move, compared to Dkos. As I have stated..these are the only two blogs I participate in.
This site has really taken off! I like the look and feel. The Green is a nice change of pace from dKos orange.