My last couple of Top Comments diaries on the DK4 Beta have been "how to find" diaries:
In Part III, I went down the DK3 Menu at the right side of the Daily Kos pages, telling you where everything could be found on DK4.
In Part II, I detailed how to find you own "page" in DK4, and contrasted it with your DK4 DK3 page.
Before that, in Part I, I talked about the opening of the beta, and gave you a link there, as well as giving a brief introduction on what you might find.
Today, we go exploring. There are lots of new features in DK4, and I'm going to highlight as many as I can over the jump. Follow along below, and then head over to the DK4 beta and look around for yourself. If you find anything exciting, interesting, or puzzling, come back and share it with us.
Once again, this diary assumes you've logged in at the beta site, though many of the features discussed below don't require it. A reminder from Sunday: your password at the beta site is the password you had back around May 25, 2010. If you hadn't yet joined Daily Kos back then, you can create a new account at the beta site to join in the fun. (Click on Become a Member in top orange bar at the right edge if you aren't yet a member; click on Log In just to the left of Become a Member if you have been a member or have set up an account.) If you had subscribed, your subscription should still work once you've logged in, but if you subscribed after May 25, it won't, because the beta doesn't know about the subscription. The final DK4 will know.
Let's start up at the top, with the narrow orange bar with the iconic "Daily Kos" at the beginning. This bar is your link to the home page, to your Messages page, and where you log in and log out (and, if you're new, where you create your account). Note that this bar is the last thing filled in by the browser, so be prepared to wait for the page to fully load before you can log in. This bar has the following items:
- The "Daily Kos" icon. You can click on it to go to the home page. (You can also click on "Home" in the menu line about two inches below it.)
- If you're logged in, you'll next see your account name and a "new messages" line that tells you if you have any new messages, with either a number or "no" (for zero new message). When you mouse over it, the username/messages block will darken; click on "new messages"—it doesn't matter whether you have any or not—to go to your Messages page. (This acts the same as the "Messages" and "new messages" links in your "Welcome back" box near the top right if you're logged in.)
Note: it was suggested the other day that the username also be turned into a link, to take you directly to your Profile page. At the moment,
- There may or may not be an "Alert" section in red. If it includes a link (as it does today, to the Bug Report form), then it will darken when you mouse over it; click to follow the link.
- If you're logged in, a "Log Out" link will be next (and last). If you're not logged in, a "Log In" link will be next, with a "Become a Member" link after it just in case you're not a member yet.
Next, let's skip over any ads, and over the large header with the flag guy in the middle—it will either say "Daily Kos" and "The State of the Nation" if you're on the home page or most other pages, or have a username or group name to the left and "a Daily Kos Community Site" to the right if you're on a user/group page such as a diary or profile page. Note that whatever is to the left of the flag buy is a clickable link, to the Daily Kos home page if it says "Daily Kos", and to the profile page of the user/group otherwise.
Below that large header is a horizontal menu with six important links—Home, My Page, People, Groups, Diaries, and Tags, plus a textbox with Search in it, and a "Go" button next to it. (If you aren't logged in, it's five links: "My Page" won't appear without a logged-in user. Here's where the exploration gets fun, and we're going to look at these one at a time. However, I'm going to skip the first and last: Home, because all it does is take you to the Home page from wherever you are, and Search, since they're still working on it; it's incomplete enough that they don't even want bug reports on it yet.
My Page: This is all yours, as long as you're logged in. If you aren't logged in, this menu item will not appear at all.
When you click on My Page, the default setting is on My Stream, which shows the latest entries in the authors, tags, and groups you're following. Gives you a quick idea of what your favorites are writing at the moment.
However, for the moment, I'm going to ask you to click on Profile at the end of that menu, and it will come up set to "My Profile". This is the home base of your account. It has all sorts of information about you, from the date you joined, how many diaries and comments you've written, what groups you're a member of, what diarists you follow and who's following you, your most frequent tags, most recent diaries, most recent recommendations for diaries to read, tags you follow, and your blogroll.
There's a ton to explore right here. You can click on any of the people who are following you or you are following, and take a look at their profile. And you can check out any of the things I mentioned about you in the previous paragraph once you're there: the diaries by other folks they've recently recommended, their own recent diaries, plus their comments and so on.
Let's take a quick look at the other six items in the menu under My Page:
- My Diaries: the Blog View shows you a very familiar-looking page, much like your current DK3 Diaries page. As best I can tell, however, it will only offer a single page like this, though offering as many diaries on a page as you've selected in a profile. There's no more 25-entry limit; it's cheerfully giving me 50, and might offer more if I asked. List View, however, will give you a list of all your diaries ever, about 100 per list page, and show a couple of sentences of preview if you mouse over a title. Another cool thing about List View: in the last, "Views" column, it tells you how many readers have viewed your diary. This may be logged-in readers only (which is how "views" work in jotter's High Impact Diaries), or it may be everyone. Something to find out.
- My Stream: already discussed. I'm not sure what the up and down arrows next to the table do—Title, Author, Date, or Comments—because when I click on any of them, they clear my screen. You can try them, but be forewarned. (Refresh the page or click again on My Stream to restore the list.)
- My Groups: These are the groups you're a member of. You can also create a new group from this page.
- Following: This will let you see the People, Groups, and Tags you're following, along with information about each. For people, how many diaries and comments they've written and the date of their most recent diary; for groups, the date of their most recent diary, and for tags, how many diaries use that tag and the date of that most recent usage. You can also see the list of the diaries you've hotlisted, the author, date, and comments for each. For all of these, you can add a note for each item on the list, explaining why you're following or hotlisting...or not. You can also remove any item from these lists here. You can also edit your Blogroll here.
- Comments: This will let you see your comments (My Comments) or your Comment ratings (My Comment Ratings—Recommends and HRs will presumably be given here at some point, but for now it just lets you know that you've rated the comment). These are offered 30 at a time, most recent initially, and then the "Next" box at the bottom will show the next 30, and the next 30, and so on. If you want to know about comments from a certain period of time, Search is the better bet...or will be, once it's ready.
- Messages: This will open showing you the contents of your Inbox, but you can select other choices. "User Messages" will show you everything that has been sent to you or that you've sent, including invitations to join groups, whether sent or received by you.
- Profile: already discussed above. A treasure trove.
People gives you general information about your fellow Kossacks. It offers five ordered lists on the entire membership of Daily Kos, one 100-user page at a time. You can, of course, click on any username to see that person's profile. The four columns after Last Diary are Number of Diaries, Number of Comments, Number of Followers, and Mojo. (An infinity sign under Mojo means the person is a Contributing Editor, or higher up on the food chain. Featured Writers do not have infinite mojo, with the exception of Bill in Portland Maine, who is Special.)
- Most Recommended: this is the default, and gives you a list of the Most Recommended Authors. I'm guessing that this means authors who have received the most diary recommendations since they joined, rather than comment recs.
- Frequent This Month: This tells you who has published the most diaries in the past month (the header reads: "most frequent authors this month"). There's currently something odd about this list, as a few authors are listed who have their most recent diary supposedly in October, or August, or even January. Something needs fixing here; it should only go back a month, or 30 days, or some basic equivalent. However, you'll notice that the top dozen are all front-page usernames (including "open thread" and "Diary Rescue"); teacherken is the first unprivileged user.
- Most Prolific: This is who's written the most diaries. Again, it's mostly front page to start, but jotter and teacherken have slipped into the top twelve.
- Most Followed: This lists who has the most followers around here. Mostly, that means who had the most subscribers on DK3, and will show up on the most Streams here on DK4.
- Highest Mojo: This is based on the new DK4 mojo calculation. Having "infinite" mojo doesn't count here, interestingly enough; the first person with that infinity sign doesn't show up until the second page. However, there are over a thousand with five-bar mojo. What would be very nice is to have numbers at the top and bottom of the page, at least, to let you know where in the list you are. (This is true of all five lists here.)
Groups: This lists all the groups that have been created in four ways, twenty groups per page. The default is "Most Followed", groups that have the most followers. Others include "Most Recent" (most recently created), "Most Active This Month" (presumably most active in December at this point, but that's demonstrably untrue based on the number of diaries given, so there may be other factors like comments involved), and "Most Prolific", which is based on most diaries published (or republished).
Diaries: the default, and the basic list everyone knows, is the "Recent Diaries" list. This is like the DK3 Recent Diaries, with a little extra information. There is no "blog-like view" for Diaries any more; it used to be available on the DK3 right-column Menu, under "Diaries".
What's new are twelve lists of diaries. They come in three categories: Most Recommended (which diaries got the most recs), Most Commented (which diaries had the most comments in them), and Most Hotlisted (which diaries were most added to people's hotlists).
Within those three categories, you have four time intervals with which to examine "most": Today (actually last 24 hours), This Week (back a full week, or 168 hours), This Month (back a month, which I've seen to be at least 29+ days), and All Time, which means since DK2 began on October 13, 2003. Note that clicking on any of the three All Time selections will take a very long time to return, and may cause an error.
Tags: This page offers Most Popular Tags in the Today (the default display for the page), This Week, This Month, and All Time denominations, and also a Most Followed Tags selection. (At the moment, DK4 is the most followed tag, perhaps unsurprisingly, and BETA (don't ask me why it's all caps; it isn't an acronym) is tied for fourth.
Below your selected list (one of the above five), there's a list of the Daily Kos "Master Tags", all of which can be followed by clicking on the hearts, and a section to "Find Tags by Type" (such as "Election", "Media", "Diary Series", etc.). I imagine both master tags and tag types will expand somewhat as time goes on, and we find the need for more.
This ends your formal tour for today. I have no doubt that you'll be able to find much more than I've discussed here, and any number of interesting features. Just keep clicking forward, letting link lead to link and page to page, and feel free to follow any author, group, or tag you want to see again. There's an interesting world out there on Daily Kos. One thing DK4 is better at is letting you see more information, and follow more connections, than DK3 could even dream of.
~~~~~
The comments below still aren't test ones (or even tested or testy ones) on this fourth beta trip, and there were a reasonable number of submissions today in the Top Comments gmail account. I thank those who took time today to transport their favorites to the Top Comments mailbox despite the beta distraction, and for doing so by the 9:30pm Eastern Time deadline. The address of our mailbox for top comments submissions remains:
TopComments AT gmail DOT com
(change " AT " to "@" and " DOT " to ".")
Anyone can send great comments to our address. Be sure to include the direct link to a comment—the URL—which is available from that comment's date/time; we need that to find your choice. Please always include your Daily Kos user name in the body of your message, so we can credit you properly. If you send a writeup with the link, we are able to include that, too, though we reserve the right to edit; if you don't do a writeup, we will.
From Seneca Doane:
JML9999 makes a clever (and nicely vicious) pun about the GOP here (you'll want to skim David Waldman's story to truly understand it).
From Benintn:
In Crashing Vor's shocking NOLA/Katrina diary, this comment from FishOutofWater was thought-provoking, disturbing, and spot-on.
From sboucher (writeup by sardonyx):
When political junquie wonders "WTF Happened While I Was Away?", john keats answers without pause for breath, as do others downthread.
From NonnyO:
Railfan's comment in response to funluvn1's funny comment in Ojibwa's excellent diary entitled Ancient England: Before Homo Sapiens gave me the giggles.
From sardonyx (your beta beta beta beta not-half-bad Wednesday diarist):
In HamdenRice's Snowpocalypse: Mike Bloomberg commits political suicide diary, edrie points out why failing to plow New York City streets after a blizzard can be truly disastrous, and worthy of outrage.
entlord points out an unfortunate resemblance that will haunt Haley Barbour's hopes on the national stage. (Some good puns downthread, too.)
Birther appeasement is a road that has no end, and BusyinCA takes it to its illogical extreme after a "long form" birth certificate is propounded, with more fun downthread.
Please add your own comment finds below!
~~~~~
Finally, we have today's top mojo using my revision of the cskendrick-devised mojo-to-Excel process.
First, Top Mojo excluding Cheers and Jeers, miscellaneous cute animals, search-identifiable tip jars, and first diary comments:
1) Chrissie Hynde, James Honeyman-Scott, by MinistryOfLove — 123
2) Stick around, LaFeminista ... by Meteor Blades — 120
3) I'm thinking that any Grandmother who is a by Alice Olson — 104
4) Unintended consequence: 2nd Amendment solution by FishOutofWater — 101
5) What mess? by Trix — 97
6) This is probably the saddest comment I've seen by stegro — 89
7) Glad You're Back by JekyllnHyde — 88
8) I remember Mayor Lindsay very well and by daliscar — 86
9) The Ancient World by Ojibwa — 84
10) bjm is someone I "know" . . . by Aji — 82
11) Thank you! by ferallike — 78
12) It's also not an outer borough problem by NYFM — 77
13) Doesn't matter whether you drive or not by sidnora — 74
14) Snow is for the little people by MinistryOfTruth — 73
15) Quick Fix by bink — 70
16) Just stop telling lies and by blindyone — 69
17) I'm sure all the Wall Street by beltane — 68
18) Yes, we know that we have to deal with snow... by Mets102 — 66
19) As an atheist by Empty Vessel — 64
20) Thank you. Before my mom's by blue jersey mom — 63
21) um, some people can't afford to order oil early by TrueBlueMajority — 62
22) Now you are going to make me by LaFeminista — 61
23) Bloomberg offered an official explination by KnotIookin — 60
24) The Manipulation is the Message by political junquie — 59
25) Aw shucks :) by Sarea — 59
26) One time when I was riding my bike... by Bob Johnson — 58
27) Yes, Toto, this isn't Kansas, and it never was... by bobswern — 58
28) The problem wasn't the diarist by wren — 58
29) Spent a night by ivorybill — 57
30) In other words, "Die." NT by QuestionAuthority — 57
31) It doesn't totally relate by Pluto — 57
32) I'm fine with you being critical of this by blindyone — 57
Top Mojo with No Exclusions:
1) Tips for Springtime for Goldman Sachs by MinistryOfTruth — 488
2) Tip Jar by HamdenRice — 449
3) Tip Jar by Sarea — 402
4) Tip Jar by brooklynbadboy — 337
5) Twit jar by LaFeminista — 317
6) Tip Jar by Crashing Vor — 301
7) Tip Jar by Cenobyte — 246
8) Tip Jar by Ojibwa — 212
9) Tip Jar by aaraujo — 200
10) Tip Jar by Eclectablog — 173
11) Tip jar by Big Tex — 144
12) Tip Jar by The Electrical Worker — 129
13) Chrissie Hynde, James Honeyman-Scott, by MinistryOfLove — 123
14) Stick around, LaFeminista ... by Meteor Blades — 120
15) Tip Jar by jamess — 118
16) I'm thinking that any Grandmother who is a by Alice Olson — 104
17) Unintended consequence: 2nd Amendment solution by FishOutofWater — 101
18) What mess? by Trix — 97
19) This is probably the saddest comment I've seen by stegro — 89
20) Glad You're Back by JekyllnHyde — 88
21) Tip Jar by Winter Rabbit — 87
22) I remember Mayor Lindsay very well and by daliscar — 86
23) The Ancient World by Ojibwa — 84
24) bjm is someone I "know" . . . by Aji — 82
25) Thank you! by ferallike — 78
26) It's also not an outer borough problem by NYFM — 77
27) Tip jar for a scary hobby by it really is that important — 76
28) Doesn't matter whether you drive or not by sidnora — 74
29) Snow is for the little people by MinistryOfTruth — 73
30) Has anyone else read about this? by cosmic debris — 71
© sardonyx; all rights reserved
All quotes are the property of the original authors or the websites that held them