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01 January 2009
Posted in
Site News
Happy New Year!! Today sees the launch of an amazing new, revised, rebooted, retooled, re-funnest, re-everything, Community Section on NZMac.com. Think "social networking" and you'll get the best understanding of what the new section brings. Applications you can add, groups you can run, friends to communicate with, Twitter tweets, walls, photos, videos and more...with additions to come later.
UPDATE - A movie outlining how to get started with this section can be found here in the Quick Tips section
This is one of the biggest revisions to this site for some time, and NZMac.com is over the moon to be renewing its commitment to the New Zealand Mac community with this great new section. Once you register on the site, login and be sure to click on the "NZMac.com Community" link at the top of the page. Then you'll gain access to the community section of the website, where you can set up your profile, add your twitter feeds, photos and more onto the site for others to share.
Feel like you want to run a group about a particular subject? Got some Mac activities that you want to promote? Then go ahead and create the group....you can even decide who gets to be in the group with you.
Here are just some of the things that you can do....
- User profiles (to be integrated with the forum with a little more work)
- Private messaging system (to be integrated with the forum with a little more work)
- Friend-buddy system
- Activity stream - see what others are up to and subscribe to the activity stream via an RSS feed
- Create and join groups
- Post on group walls
- Control group membership
- Subscribe to group activity streams
- Photos hosting and video embedding supported
- ...and more. New features are being added at quite a fast pace
Note - It is important to understand that for most activities, you need to add the appropriate application in to your user profile
The component is relatively new, so please keep an eye on the forum for any announcements or issues. The developers are working furiously to fix bugs and add new features. Luckily, they've also released a developer API, so people are building new additions for the component all the time.
Quick Tips - Now includes site help
One of the things I released quickly with the component is that for some, it may take some getting used to, To help with that, I've created a new section in the Quick Tips area of the site (http://www.nzmac.com/quick-tips/community-section.html). This section isn't so much about using your Mac, but about using the NZMac.com website....and you are welcome to contribute to it, by submitting Quick Tips.
In fact...
Community Guides in the community area
One of the things I realised with the development of the new community area, is the need for some users willing to support others by suggesting or agreeing to developments in the community area. To that end, I have created a group known as "Community Guides". This group is not an open group, but is a group I want to invite regular contributors to the site to consider joining if they are willing to help others within the Community area.
At this stage, I don't think I can assign moderation roles to these people (I may be wrong, but I'll keep exploring) but instead the intention will be for the members of this group to...
- Submit Quick Tips for the benefit of others
- Respond to support questions in the "Using NZMac.com" section of the forum
- Debate the benefits of groups that users wish to create (please note, I'm not suggesting we censor groups...just deal with any controversies collectively)
- Debate changes to the layout, functionality (within reason, given my lack of coding ability), purpose etc of the Community area
Please DO NOT sign up to join this group unless you are able to commit to all those things. I really want this group to be a small group that bounces ideas off each other (this discussions will be publicly visible) and then makes determinations based upon that discussion. This group should NOT be seen as a group you first talk to for Mac support....that should always be within the NZMac.com Forum
As always (and particularly with a new section) there will be some time during which the section 'beds in' and changes, so please bear with us whilst we get all this done.
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