Behind the scenes at Daily Kos, staff in multiple departments (Product, Tech, Community, and Trending to name a few) strive to make it as easy as possible for site members to take full advantage of the site’s features. The main repository for the tools and resources we provide is the Help Desk, hosted on a new platform since early 2021.
The layout you see when you arrive at that page displays a number of links at the top related to the most commonly-asked questions. Below that list you’ll see a number of tiles bearing labels we hope are self-explanatory. “Site Status,” “Welcome to Daily Kos,” and “Video How-Tos” fill the first row.
“Site Status” is a useful resource to keep handy juuuust in case you have persistent trouble loading the site; that tile includes a story with the status.dailykos.com link, the one to consult for verifying a known outage. (It is possible, of course, that you’d be the first to notice it, before the on-call developer has had a chance to investigate—but unlikely.) “Welcome to Daily Kos” is populated with a number of text-heavy tutorials that we will explore soon in another post. The third one, “Video How-Tos,” is the category I’d like to discuss in some detail today.
An old aphorism asserts a picture is worth a thousand words. That relative efficiency is only increased with videos. Thus we have devoted staff time and expertise (mostly provided by Walter Einenkel, Trending News Editor) to producing several short, focused video tutorials. The embedded videos below are all hosted on the Daily Kos YouTube channel. A link to each one is provided beneath the overall category at the Help Desk for permanent easy reference.
All of the videos are captioned, but so far only one has a voice-over. That one is “What is Daily Kos?” a good introduction to the wide variety of core projects we pursue, narrated by our Content Strategist, Cara Zelaya.
In addition to this general site overview, several other videos narrow in on specific key site features, which we’ll review in the order a new site member might need. If you want to keep up on this group as they’re added, their titles all start with “Daily Kos Tutorial.” We’ll also continue to update the articles within the “Video How-Tos” heading at Help Desk.
First, let’s review the short Daily Kos Tutorial on “How to sign up for a free account at Daily Kos.” There’s not much to it, really. It’s important to give some thought to your username, since it will be associated with everything you post at the site. And it’s important to watch for the confirmation email that will be sent to the email address you supply, so that you can click the link it contains to verify your interest.
Once a site reader becomes a site member, the fun may commence. But getting a handle on all the site features can take a little time, particularly for those who hesitate about clicking something to see what happens next. That’s where the next Daily Kos Tutorial, “How to recommend, share, and comment on a story on Daily Kos“ comes into play.
It seems much easier once you watch someone go through the steps, doesn’t it? While we’re reviewing these basic steps, perhaps a couple of finer points merit a mention:
- Stories may be recommended indefinitely.
- Once you recommend a story, you can decide to unrecommend it—but that’s your final “bite of the apple,” so to speak. You’ll get a confirmation alert to ask whether you want to UNrecommend it.
- Comments may be recommended only for 24 hours after they’re posted.
- Unlike the one-time-only limit for story recommends, comment recommends can be undone and redone, though that 24-hour limit still applies.
- Stories remain open to new comments or replies to comments for only nine days.
- Comments may not be edited once they are published. Once you click the “Submit your comment” button, it’s going up. BUT
- After you hit Preview, the Return to Edit option is available. It’s possible to go between Preview mode and Edit mode (displaying the editor toolbars) as many times as it takes you to get it just right.
- PLUS, in the edit mode you may also Cancel your draft comment altogether, if you have reconsidered your impulse to comment.
Once a new user has the hang of the recommend-and-comment tools, perhaps they’ll decide to write a post of their own. (There’s no obligation to do so, however, and some very active site members never do.) In that case, this Daily Kos Tutorial may meet the need: “Writing a Story on Daily Kos.”
Here again the basic process is relatively simple, but there is much more to learn about it all, over time. The related text-based tutorial on the Help Desk, “How to write a Daily Kos story: The Basics,” provides significantly more detail. For example, there is much more information in the text tutorial about how to use Tags, a required component of every post, and how to schedule a post for publication later, rather than immediately.
The fourth and so far last Daily Kos Tutorial on YouTube is “How to use the Image Library.”
The video shows how to access the Image Library, how to find and upload images to it, and how to embed images from the Image Library into Daily Kos stories you write. The written resource at the Help Desk that points to the video also notes that images may be embedded in comments, too-- although users on the m.dailykos.com site, the simpler version of the site currently loaded by default on mobile devices, cannot do so. It is still true that we permit embedding of a few images hosted on off-site platforms, but most of them have disappeared. The notable exception for still images is Flickr.
Of course, we also support embeds of tweets, IG posts, Facebook and Vimeo videos, along with a few others—and perhaps a tutorial or two updating our resources would be the next set to address. That possibility is just one of the several subjects we have in mind for tutorials, both video and text-based, but we also would sincerely like to know what you think would help most. Your input will help us prioritize our to-do list and thereby, we hope, also facilitate the participation of more new members of the site.
