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 Crossposting.
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 204259 you probably haven't had the opportunity to participate in one of my Welcome New Users diaries.
That would be 370 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.
Crossposting
Crossposting is the act of posting your articles on multiple blogs. A lot of people are hung up on "original content" and exclusivity but I'm not. In fact it can be quite interesting to see how your writing is received by different audiences.
Among my great regrets is that I haven't provided enough material to blogs I support in principle but not with contributions. This is one of the reasons Booman thinks I'm an assclown along with the fact I'm not ready to concede LBJ was a liberal. Likewise Maryscott OConnor may have a beef with me for lack of activity.
I concentrate a lot of my blogging at dKos in comments because of the chat like immediacy of the Ajax. I help organize some of the online features because they provide me the opportunity to do that and I enjoy it.
I also devote a lot of energy to DocuDharma. I usually post about 5 or six times a week and I promote the morning essays.
I'm really proud of the quality of content and the amount of it. I think we compare favorably to Firedog Lake's front page in terms of frequency considering we don't have 6 contributing personal blogs AND a group blog backing us up.
Though we do have some common contributors like A Siegel and Something the Dog Said.
Myself I don't contribute to Firedog Lake beyond the occasional comment. When I do it's more an expression of enthusiasm than anything else because of their lack of nesting and threading. Likewise OpenLeft which does have nesting and threading and I'm popular enough, but I seldom have content that suits their hard core political orientation.
At DocuDharma we're pretty much open to anything including poetry and fiction (provided it's obvious or clearly labeled).
We also have highly tolerant HTML and flexible Intro and Body boundaries so you can achieve your artistic vision which will be crushed like a bug if I decide to promote it without apology. Your pictures will be restricted to width="500", no exceptions.
But to me the main attraction is the ability to draw attention to an issue you think is being neglected or otherwise get a little more exposure for your work.
If you post regularly you'll soon find your google presence enhanced, on most days my Number Nineness is exceeded only by my Cliffs Notes, Sparks Notes, and Wikipedia Entry. Even my 49281 comes in second.
People who have DocuDharma in their blogrolls know what a fun place it can be and you should ask them to crosspost if you think their diaries are not gaining sufficient traction, but on many days I look at the Recommended list and count lots of DocuDharma authors.
Not that you need a monster diary to crosspost, the reason we allow multiple essays a day is so that you are free to experiment. You can comment right away, it takes only 24 hours to vest in essays.
Our three core rules are no kos bashing, no outing, and no I/P. If you can manage to avoid those pretty much anything goes.
When I joined Daily Kos, 4 years ago April Fools Day, I was looking for a community where it was ok if you happened to let it slip that you were a Democrat. DocuDharma is a little port of orange, it's ok to let it slip that you are a Social Democrat.
What we can't offer is chat immediacy and this is reflected in the relatively low number of comments, but this is a reality for many blogs that don't auto refresh, Firedog Lake being an exception only for articles featured on the front page- Spencer Ackerman and Tbogg have plenty of posts with no comments at all. I have no idea why Eschaton consistently runs up the score with their horrible Haloscan comments, Hullabaloo seems to me more typical.
I hope this encourages you to take a chance and register with DocuDharma. We're very nice people and would love to have your contributions.