Navigating Sarasota Local: The best way to learn your way around the Sarasota Local Community is to poke around and explore! There’s nothing like uncovering all the great features of the community. But there’s nothing wrong with a helping hand, so here’s a guide to the features and functions. As always, if you have any comments, suggestions or questions, please email us.
Sections:
- Signing up
- Personalized Top Bar (private messages, viewing friends, etc.)
- My Page = Your Home Page
- Local Reviews
- Message Boards & Forums
- Groups
- Other Features
The first thing you'll want to do is sign in (or join if you haven't already!)
Once you've signed in, you'll see a personalized greeting, and you'll be able to use the custom bar at the very top, (you'll see your username, a mail icon and friend icon):
Clicking on one of the icons will make the selection drop down:
3. My Page = Your Home page / Profile page
Click on the "My Page" tab at the top to go to your home page. This is your very own page to customize as you wish. You can even add your own blog! It’s simple to upload photos, videos and add your own captions! You can also totally customize the appearance of your profile page, add widgets, content, music and so much more.
From your profile page, you can click the 'Edit My Profile Theme/Appearance' to change the fonts, color scheme and template of your personal profile page.
You can also click the About Me to change your profile questions, manage your profile photo, edit your privacy settings and more.
Ok, so do you ever wonder what others are saying about different restaurants, clubs, beaches, etc.? Or maybe you wanted to rave about that great little restaurant that just opened up, well now is your chance! The Local Reviews tab contains all kinds of categories for just about anything around town.
To view all the categories simply click on the left where it says view all:
RATINGS:
From there simply click on a category to view all the ratings and reviews for that particular category. You can add your rating and review simply by clicking on the "Rate" button on the right hand side. It will pop up 5 stars and simply select how many you want.
After you've rated the place, restaurant, event, etc. you can now add a comment about that place right below the information given for the venue:
IMPORTANT!: If you don't see the place you want to rate & review YOU CAN ADD IT! 1) Select the category where the review should go, 2) Click on "Start a New Review"
3) Then add the name of place in the description box. In the main box please add the address if known, the contact phone, a brief (unbiased; you can add your biased review after the place has been added) description and if you want a picture of the place and link to their website. Then click "add review"
There are two places you can post questions to the community.
- Main Forums Page: This page features our primary discussion topics. Click the "Forums" tab to visit. There are plenty of forum categories to discuss everything and anything and if you don't see a category that you would like to add please contact us. The latest discussions in our top categories are on the Forums main page. The most recent are also posted on the site's home page. On the Forums page itself, you can quickly access all categories in the left hand column.
Following Discussions: Within specific forums, you can choose to be notified of new discussions by clicking the Notify link at the bottom of forum pages, or the Follow link within individual discussions.
In Groups, you can post discussions according to topic, and even create your own Group. Click the "Groups" tab to visit. Group forums are different than the regular site forums, so be sure to delve deeper into groups for super-targeted discussion topics.
START A GROUP FOR YOUR INTERESTS (Ex; Cooking Group, Golf Group, etc): Get a free bulletin board, mass member mailing and more by starting a group for your your interests or organization. You can set up groups to be closed (invitation only) or open (anyone can join). You'll see the "create new group" link on the left hand side of the page after you've clicked on the Group tab.
The "Share" button:
Allows you to send an email to your friends and so they can respond to your post and join the discussion:
Friends
To send a community member a friend request, click on the “add as a friend” link, located under their main profile picture on the upper left corner. Once that person accepts your request, you will be friends and you can track each other’s activity on the community!
Other options
Comments:
Comments are separate from message board responses. A comment is a one-on-one message from you to another person. You can comment on another member’s page, picture, blog entry or video. The comment will appear on that person’s page in the exact place you left it.
Photos & Videos:
You can upload photos and videos either from your homepage, or by clicking the "Photos" or "Videos" tab. You can upload your own videos from computer, and you can also upload YouTube videos to the Videos section.
You can also insert YouTube videos into your forum posts: Go to the desired video on http://www.youtube.com/ and copy and paste the “embed” code, located on the upper right, directly into your comment box.
Invite:
Allows you to send an invitation via email to a friend who is not yet a community member. Just add your friend’s name and email address and they’ll receive an email from us!
Tags:
A tag is a key word. Adding tags to your comments, videos, photos, etc., allows you to search for other pages with similar tags.
You can add tags to any discussion, even ones someone else started!
For Advanced Users:
RSS
RSS feeds are provided for a variety of different sections of our Community. You can subscribe to feeds for the Main Discussion area, the Latest Activity, or subscribe to a Group feed, for example. You can use these feeds with a variety of RSS reader software and web-based news readers or personalizable homepages (like iGoogle or My Yahoo!)
Besides offering RSS feeds for Sarasota Local content, you can add RSS feeds to your homepage. Your RSS box on the left vertical bar, under your photos, allows you to enter the URL of your blog or another blog that you like. Your friends can see the titles of the blog entries as well as small excerpts!
A special thanks to the folks at the Firefighter Nation for letting us use their baseline 'how to' template!
Still Have Questions? Suggestions for this Page?
Please send us an email: Contact Us
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