One of the big issues with an online community is staying connected and up-to-date. With new articles, weblinks, events and daily forum activity, it's easy to lose track of what's going on. So, what are your options? Here are a few ideas.
In the near future we hope to offer a "Daily Digest" service, which is an email, sent out once a day, of forum activity for that day. You will be able to subscribe or unsubscribe from the mail list whenever you want.
Until we have a daily digest, the easiest way to find out what's new on the forum is to click on the "Unread Posts" button on the forum menu bar (under the logo). This should give you a list of all the recent forum posts that you haven't visited yet. Once you visit them, they won't show up again on this list, or you can click the "Mark All Messages As Read" link.
If you want to find a recent post but already marked it as read and can't remember which thread it was in, you can click on "Recent Posts" and you will be given a list of posts in chronological order, starting with the most recent.
But if you're anything like me, you don't want to have to visit the website just to check if there's been anything new posted since the last time you were here. So, what's the answer? Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of RSS!
RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works -- such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video -- in a standardized format. When you see the icon displayed on the left, the page you are looking at, or a portion of it at lease, is available through RSS. When you're at BSLC Online, you may have noticed the same little icon on the forum, as well as (not quite so noticeably in the bottom, right corner) on the home page.
Here it is on the Forum:
Here it is on the Home page:
In addition to the icon appearing on a page, your browser may also (or instead) display a different icon in the address bar:
Icon in Safari's address bar:
Icon in Firefox's address bar (not the star):
Wherever it appears, it means the same thing: You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the current page.
So, that's all fine and dandy, but what do you do with it? Well, that's going to depend on what web browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox) you're using. I'll try to give directions for each of the main three browsers to hopefully include everyone.
Safari
If you're using Safari, this will be pretty easy. Safari itself is an RSS reader which takes a certain level of complication out of the equation (way to go Steve Jobs!). If you click on the icon in the address bar or the icon on the page, Safari will show you the most recent posts (image below is for the CNN feed) with a brief summary and a "Read more..." link.
To subscribe to it, just create a bookmark (Cmd-d) and save it someplace handy (I like to put them in an RSS folder on my Menu Bar):
The EXTRA nice thing about Safari is that it will let you know if there are any new posts you haven't read by adding a number in parenthesis next to the folder on your menu bar like this:
This way you always know if there's new content that you need to check out.
Firefox
Firefox is a little more complicated than Safari, but still very useful. Firefox has something called "Live Bookmarks" which function very similarly to Safari with one exception that I'll mention momentarily.
To subscribe to an RSS feed in Firefox, click on the icon just like in Safari and Firefox will open the RSS feed.
If you click the "Subscribe Now" button, Firefox will ask you where you want to save it. Again, I like to add mine to the Bookmarks Toolbar in an RSS folder.
Now, here's the one difference between Safari and Firefox: Firefox will NOT give you any obvious notice that there are new posts. When you navigate to the Live Bookmark it will just show you a list of all the posts:
Are we doomed? Is there no solution?! Of course not...it is Firefox, after all, and someone has come up with a solution...actually, several someones have come up with solutions but I'm going to tell you about the one I like the best.
Brief is an RSS feed reader extension for Firefox that will notify you when there are new posts in the feeds you have subscribed to. Just install the extension and tell it where you're storing your Live Bookmarks. There are a number of other configuration options like how often to check for new posts, whether or not you want to be notified, etc.
Once you have it installed and configured, you'll have a nifty little icon in the Firefox status bar (the bar at the bottom of the browser window) that will show you if there are any new posts:
By clicking on the little icon, you will have instant access to any new content.
Internet Explorer
IE is just as easy to subscribe to a feed (pretty much the same as Firefox and Safari -- just add a bookmark) but I don't know of a way of setting it to notify you of new posts. There are probably applications you can install that will do it, but I'm not a Windoze guy so you're gonna have to go to "The Google" to get more information. Sorry I can't be more help in this department!
So, there you have...the wonderful world of RSS feeds. If you have any questions regarding this topic, let us know.
