Welcome, New Users, to The Daily Kos. This Diary is intended to help you orient yourself to the site and ask questions about how to use it.
In the Body you will find some links intended to get you participating more effectively. Also in the Body this week is a discussion of Scrapbooking.
After that you can ask me any question you want. I don't know all the answers so if you stump me, you do. I invite those wiser than I to contribute and correct (or raise a ruckus, just don't scare people).
No permission slips needed, join us at the deep end of the pool for adult swim.
Hello Devil. Welcome to Hell.
If your user id (hover your mouse over your name in any comment, look at the status bar in the bottom of your browser) is larger than 200062 you probably haven't had the opportunity to participate in one of my Welcome New Users diaries.
That would be 782 of you more or less.
There are 13 of them that I consider the New Users Guide and I encourage you to take a look at the table of contents at least so you can see what kind of information is already available.
But don't panic, I'm always happy to review.
Happy New Year's!
Scrapbooking
Something that my mom is looking forward to as a gift is a CD copy of my collected works. One that doesn't depend on an internet connection.
There are other reasons why it may be handy to make a copy of your diary or essay and all it's comments including organizing and documenting, and as we saw this year with the unfortunate demise of peeder's place mere links will not do, though they are handy.
Anyway my New Year's resolution is to try and bring some kind of organization to my ouvre.
Capturing
An easy and often overlooked way to document an internet page is to go File, Save As, HTML.
You should take the time to make the name something easily memorable and it's best to save in the Desktop for further organization.
What you'll end up with is a File with the name you gave it and the extention .HTM and a folder with the same name that contains all the graphics and crap that went into the page.
When you click on the file again it will mostly look like the original page. Some flash graphics and links deteriorate over time but other links are fairly durable. Sometimes the link content changes too, but you're the one who chose to write in photons.
These File/Folder pairs can be placed themselves in any folder on any arbitrary media.
I've been using this technique for years to organize downloaded binaries (put the download catalog entry image in relation to the installation object so you can remember why you wanted it in the first place dummy), but it just now struck me how potentially useful this is as an archive format for scoop type blogs.
And it's much easier than my earlier regime.
How To Find Your Stuff
Search your History.
I for instance have written 304 Diaries (so you're waaaaaaaay overdue for an Opus 300 in any event).
Even so at 50 a screen it's only 7 pages back to the future. Yes it really, really bites you have to scroll to the bottom to find the 'Next Page' button.
My very first diary. It is, appropriately, a meta diary. About other websites. One month after I joined.
Still use Yahoo News at least 3 times a week.
Organization
Speaking of.
You can do all kinds of fancy on line sorting, here's the 75 everything I've ever written EXCEPT for-
It adds up to more than 100% because some of it is dual purposed.
A meta note- I surfaced 10 Sausage Grinders of Snark but the indexes update only every so often.
Comments
34410 overall, but indexes are tricky, especially the recent ones. By year-
In order to preserve those in context you'd have to go to each one and save the diary it came from.
Magnifies the problem tenfold so I'll skip it for now.
But the most relevant are these. Still time to troll rate or ♥.