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 Speed Reading using The Daily Kos (dKos) interface.
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.
Romper, bomper, stomper boo. Tell me, tell me, tell me, do. Magic mirror, tell me today, have all my friends been good at play?
I can see marti11 (#115483) and CopyPolice (#116187), the first and last users to join the week of 1/12/07 to 1/18/07, and all of you boys and girls out there in DailyKosland!
Hello Devil. Welcome to Hell.
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Other diaries in the Welcome New Users Series. The Welcome New Users dKosopedia page.
Speed Reading
More than anything else on this site, I like to read. I like to read your Diaries. Yesterday there were 257 Diaries and I probably read about 150 of them.
I could have read them all.
And by read I don't mean poured over every one of the 471 Comments and associated Ratings and Time Stamps to tease our their hidden messages of vanity and politics, though I could do that to.
I mean read enough of the diary to have decided it was something I was interested in, and then as many Comments I needed to decide if I had anything to contribute to the conversation, if I wanted to Diary Recommend it (rare), if I wanted to Recommend the Diarist's Tip Jar, and if I wanted to fix up the Tags (which I should do more often).
It's not even very hard, you can do it right from the Front Page using only the tools any member has.
In the right most column of the Front Page there are 9 major sections- 'Menu', 'About', 'Tools', 'Diary Drafts', 'Recommended Diaries', 'Recent Diaries', 'Candidates', 'DailyKos Feeds', and the 'Blogroll'. I listed them all, because we're going to go aaall the way down to the bottom of the 'Recent Diaries' section.
There is a box labeled 'Show'. Type in '50'. Hit the 'Set' button.
Do it now.
Welcome to the matrix.
Perversely enough you can set 'Recent Diaries' as low as 1. It's been a long time, but I think the default value is 30. By adding that extra 66%, you now have a list that usually turns over about 4 or 5 times a day, so by visiting dKos just 4 or 5 times a day you can see the 'Author' and 'Title' of every Diary.
In fact that is what I do mostly. I'll check in the morning, I can usually see where I left off reading the night before by the burnt orange of the link. I'll skip the Diaries by bonddad and Jerome a Paris because I'm not much into economics. I'll scan the whole list to see what people are talking about and start reading the most interesting thing to me. I usually give this an hour, time when I might be reading a newspaper, but I watch cable news instead.
Then busy, busy, busy 'til lunch when I'll check in again. If by some stroke the 'Recent Diaries' List has cycled so that I can't find my stop I don't sweat it, I have 50 Diaries to pick and choose from and if I run out of new material before lunch is over I can go hunting to see if I missed anything interesting.
Again before dinner and before bed if you have things to do. I mostly work nights so from 9 to about 1 or 2 (sometimes I'll watch The Daily Show repeats) I'll be wailing on the 'Refresh' button of my Browser hoping for someone to publish something interesting.
I really do appreciate your work.
Reading Faster
Ok ek, that works now after the election, but we have hearings and impeachments and arrests and trials and primaries coming up. Not to mention the odd war or two.
Say hello to my little friend- 'Search'.
Down at the bottom of the 'Recent Diaries' List, just below 'Show' 50 'Set', is a button that says Recent Diary List. Whoo Whooo! Chug, chug, chug. It's a View Engine.
What's good about this view, which I call The Window of Time, is that you can go back in time, 50 diaries at a clip, for days and days and days.
I have them in Bookmark folders that I can open all at once in Tabs using my Firefox Browser.
They have the FULL Title of the Diary and the Author and the Time / Date. Title and Author are clickable links, you can use the Time / Date stamp to see how fast Diary Traffic is. I have never, ever seen a Diary go from #1 to #51 (and thus off the 'Recent Diaries' List) in less than an hour, let alone "minutes'.
Diary Glut? I sneer at you. I roam across continents of poems with ease.
Faster and Deeper
The essential skill you need to develop to efficiently use these views is the ability to decide on the basis of Title and Author what Diaries you're interested in. But if your concern is that some Diaries don't get a fair shake that way you can look at them more closely.
By adding &story_view=long to the 'Search' URL (that's the scary looking collection of letters and numbers starting with 'http://' near the top of your Browser) you can still get to that most beautiful of views, The Magic Bullet-
Best to Bookmark this magic, the button you need to push no longer exists.
What makes it particularly attractive and efficient in very high traffic times is the fact that it displays the Intro to the Diary. As an Author, this is your maximum opportunity to impress a scanning reader. As a reader you should be able to assess the direction of the Diary and the skill of the presentation, no matter how misleading the Title. If I looked at things this way and still missed your Diary I'm sorry.
I don't understand why this is buried so deeply, when it comes to User Interface in dK 4.0 I hope someone takes a look and says- "If you could only see 100 at a time!"
'Search' has other tricks to help you look fast and deep. Want to see all the Diaries yesterday?
swish-e 'Search' views give you FULL Title and Author links, Time / Date, number of Comments, number of Diary Recommendations and Impact.
What makes it really shallow and one dimensional is that you can use it to keep track of where the action is on the site.
I contend the tools already exist to let you drink as much or as little from the firehose as you want. I contend the User Interface of dKos can be easily navigated even with 1000 Diary a day traffic. I attribute complaints about "too many Diaries" to the poor job we do educating, and I do what I can to correct it.
Reading lots of comments
So ek, what's a lot of comments?
Over 100 Comments.
Odd, really, that this should come up in TDS/TCR Spoiler Thread, but it's definitely a Diary that demonstrates a lot.
dmsilev's definition of midlisty is something I've always aspired to achieve. Today I'd say that covers 20 to 100 Comments. Yesterday's Diaries have #26 to #115 meeting that threshold (out of 257).
Most nights the TDS/TCR Spoiler Thread generates almost exactly 100 Comments. It publishes at a regular time (a skill I am attempting to learn) and it is like Cheers. No, not that one. This one.
I am Norm.
I think you're missing the point here. It's not that Wile E. Coyote wants to eat necessarily or that he wants to eat a roadrunner. What he wants is to eat that particular roadrunner. It's very existential.
So you walk in and everyone says- "Norm!"
And we watch Sam pitch the big game and whistle and hoot in appropriate spots except vawolf who throws hugs and kisses at her even though she's married to Jason Jones and has a daughter, Piper.
In the early course of the thread it's pretty easy to keep up using the scroll buttons of your Browser or the scroll wheel on your mouse. Later on you start watching the lower right corner of the browser for the Ajax Comment and Reply notifications. At 101 Comments, new Comments show up in the main window collapsed with just the Subject: visible.
Too much information!
One way to continue to track new Comments is to leave them collapsed and expand them one at a time. The problem is that as the thread ages they tend to come in bunches of 5 or 6 or more and you can miss one or 2 that attach to Comments above and below your vision. You can also use the red [new] string to locate ones you've opened and read.
The sad fact of the matter is that sooner or later you will lose track of the state of your Recommend box, meaning that you'll be clicking on a Comment you've already Recommended because the box appears empty, but you'll in fact be unRecommending. You can pick this up visually by watching the Average Rating, but it's tricky.
You can correct this by hitting the 'Refresh' button on your Browser; which will refresh the check boxes, open all the Comments, and reset all the red [new] markers. I'll do this for the first 200 Comments, but I'm lazy and it's hard work. If I haven't made my point by now it's too late.
Sorry Cheers and Jeers.
If you bother to deconstruct the Huge Comment Threads you will find that many small conversations are going on in parallel. This is because people are using various 'Search' views and their 'Hotlist' to track responses to their Comments.
Remember that Comment Tab we talked about last week?
I look at it when I check in to see if any of my Comments have Replies, or if the number of Replies has changed. At an average of 13.5 Comments a day I don't find my activity too hard to keep track of, especially as it's not a goal of mine to leave my fingerprints on every Diary I read.
When Diaries get Huge refreshes occur at odd times. You'll think you've looked at something and all of a sudden you'll get a flood of new Comments and Replies and the markers will get reset.
Bummer.
This also happens in the backdoor views which is sometimes good and sometimes bad, but for which I have no explanation.
Reading Lots
The very best reason to read lots is to understand the cast of characters here at dKos. We have many remarkable and talented members. It's not an impossibly huge universe. Yesterday there were 3184 active members. Last year there were 32,379 active members. I hope someday soon to see a hundred thousand active members and a thousand Diaries a day.
Have a great time at dKos.
There are other things to talk about. Let's get started.