Welcome, New Users, to 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 of this diary you will find some links intended to get you participating more effectively. Also in the Body this week is a discussion of Following Your Favorite Writers by using the Hotlist function to save individual diaries and subscribe to your favorite diarists.
After that you can ask me any question you want. If I don't have the answers you seek I'll go out and find 'em and bring 'em back to ya (wink, wink). I also invite those wiser than I to contribute and correct (or raise a ruckus, just don't scare people).
Note: This is an unauthorized foray into the realm of Welcome New Users. I am only an egg here myself and hope that any attempt to revive this effort is appreciated by those who got the ball rolling, and especially the person who wrote literally dozens of such entries over the years.
Before we begin with new material, I encourage everyone here to review some of the
previously written goodness that survives here in the DKos archives.
And, if you're new, don't miss
The Welcome New Users dKosopedia page.
So: Who am I and Why Am I Here?
Good question! I first stumbled into DKos during the primary wars, when a group of Hillary supporters had just stalked off the site in a rage. Ah, good times. Since then it's been a thoroughly peaceful and utterly unruffled place (cough). I was a clueless n00b who quickly became dependent on the Welcome New Users diaries, and although I am still relatively new myself I hope to help Laughing Planet in his efforts to revive the series.
Welcome to my addiction. You may be surprised how quickly it becomes your own.
So, on to today's topic:
How To Save Diaries and Subscribe to Your Favorite Diarists
Now, as much as I love serious policy and action-oriented diaries I'm also a sucker for feel-good photodiaries and don't want to miss a one, so I've subscribed to my favorite Diarist who somehow always gets the latest and best Obama pictures. You, of course, may have more serious concerns.
If you want to save an individual diary for future reference, click on the Hotlist button located after the diary title, which will then change to this:
If you develop passionate feelings for a diarist and want to subscribe to every diary they write in the future, click the Subscribe link right after their name. This will automatically add future diaries by that author to your Hotlist. You won't be notified when they publish-- you'll need to check your Hotlist on a daily basis (or an hourly basis if you're the obsessive type).
Now click on the Your Hotlist button under the Tools menu in the right-hand column. The individual diaries you've saved will be listed first. Scroll down past them to get to the diarists you've subscribed to, listed under Diary Watchlist, and you'll see how many of your favorites you get to catch up on.
Comments that are replies to any of your comments are also automatically added to your hotlist.
A few more random suggestions:
* Be Clear on the Concept of what the purpose of this site is all about.
This is a Democratic blog, a partisan blog. One that recognizes that Democrats run from left to right on the ideological spectrum, and yet we're all still in this fight together. We happily embrace centrists like NDN's Simon Rosenberg and Howard Dean, conservatives like Martin Frost and Brad Carson, and liberals like John Kerry and Barack Obama. Liberal? Yeah, we're around here and we're proud. But it's not a liberal blog. It's a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory
* Be generous with your tips and recommends. It doesn't cost you anything, and most diarists put a lot of time and effort into their diaries. My general rule of thumb is to drop a tip in the
Tip Jar (the first comment after any diary) to show my appreciation for the diarist's work. If I think the diary is of compelling general interest that just about everyone ought to see, I also hit the
Recommend button in the right hand column.
*Play Nice. There is no "Edit Comment" button. Once you hit "Post Comment", it is there FOREVER. The golden rule does apply to the internet despite myraid reams of evidence that might lead you to believe otherwise.
So-- who's gonna have the first question?