“How to Use This Blog” Video Tutorial
Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 7:34 PM by: Torley
You are here. You may not know what to do…
Don’t be afraid, everything’s going to be alright!
Words were insufficient, so I’ve done a narrated video tutorial of how to use the Official Blog of Linden Lab (what’s a blog?).
kindly hosted by blip.tv
It came together really smoothly except for the final leg of encoding and uploading it. :p
(Sowwies for the audio clicks, I don’t know how they got in there but I’d better learn how to get them out.)
You can also learn more about Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to automatically subscribe and stay up-to-date on the latest-’n'-greatest in Linden writings. And I did mention Sage, my chosen feed reader.
Tor <3 Rav
August 8th, 2006 at 9:10 PM
Those sound effects are just too cute. >.
August 9th, 2006 at 2:44 AM
You can add atom/ to the end of any feed url to get the ATOM feed instead of the RSS feed.
http://blog.secondlife.com/feed/ becomes http://blog.secondlife.com/feed/atom/
Usefull to know if for whatever reason, you prefer ATOM.
PS. There’s also a WordPress theme running about that makes the feed itself hAtom compliant. So you wouldn’t need to subscribe to the feed, you’d just need to subscribe to http://blog.secondlife.com/ (for those less geeky than I, with hAtom, the page becomes the feed)
August 9th, 2006 at 6:41 AM
Great video!, but I was NOT expecting you to be as hyper as your typing conveys
Keep up the great work! 
August 9th, 2006 at 8:43 AM
The RSS feed tutorial tells you how to generate and publish and promote a feed, but it doesn’t tell the end-user how to *get* a feed and how to look at it. I often press on the RSS feed thingies and see a lot of code or error messages. I try to figure out what should be cut and pasted to link somewhere, say, in a blog article. Nothing makes sense, I give up.
August 9th, 2006 at 9:37 AM
THE CUTENESS! IT’S INFECTED MY BRAIN!!
BTW, you pointed at Kelly’s name when you talked about your girlfriend. Are you two dating? O.O
Or was it subconcious?
August 9th, 2006 at 1:06 PM
You we’re just dying to say that “Yay!” thing at the end, weren’t you?
August 9th, 2006 at 2:47 PM
YAYZERAMA!!!
August 10th, 2006 at 12:04 AM
Prokofy this might help.
http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.shtml
What it boils down to is, you need a little program or plugin for your browser. You give the rss feed to that program/plugin and then it will notify when there is a update.
There are also websites that you can use instead of a plugin, i myself use bloglines.com. I put all the rss feeds that i’m interrested in there, and check that a couple of times a day.
Hope you figure it out, it can be really usefull, but also very time comesuming if you subscribe to to many feeds.
Great movie Torley, it is funny hearing you say Yayzerama! I allways thought it was much faster pronounced. The zerama following the Yay more quickly.
Keep up the good work. =)
August 10th, 2006 at 10:53 AM
Torley, you silver tongued devil, you!
This is a nice and essential little tutorial to help us assimilate into the Linden blog. Thanks for putting it together. I echo the comment on the RSS - I think you should do a series of shorter How to’s maybe edit this one so it just covers the blog points, then another for RSS, etc… I think you were just tangenting when you saw the RSS button, right? 
Anyways, I appreciate the info, thanks again Torley!
August 10th, 2006 at 7:38 PM
For some reason I could not view this. I tried both links and could hear it but not see it. Any ideas?
August 11th, 2006 at 9:25 AM
So that is what Torley sounds like! By the way, your tutorial assumes one can log in. Only Lindens can apparently do that. For the rest of us, we get asked for a name and mail address to make comments.
August 11th, 2006 at 5:15 PM
Thank you graciously for all the comments–you’re helping me to adapt!
So, some peeps asked if there was an easier way to subscribe than RSS, and I’m investigating (yes, that big word) the option of subscribing to the blog via email so you don’t even have to come here… just check your inbox.
Luna: More how to’s are a GREAT idea… they’re bound to come eventually as I see new opportunities. I’m full of tangents too.
musicteacher: You need Apple QuickTime–that’s also readily used in Second Life to play movies. Try to download from: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/ Just let me know if that still doesn’t work.
Ceera: I failed to mention that, thanx for the clarification! Makes me think there should be some way you can register your name. (Fruit for further thought.)
YAYZERAMA!
August 12th, 2006 at 12:07 AM
Torley, I can’t see movies of blip.TV on Safari and even FireFox on my Mac OS. I can see it by Quick Time player after downloading the movie file though.
August 14th, 2006 at 7:32 AM
Torley? Some other issues regarding resident Blog access.
Right now, my “Leave a Reply” dialog pre-enters the name and e-mail of the last account that I commented here as. That is all well and good if you only use one avatar to comment in the Blogs. But so far I have used two accounts to make blog replies, and when I look at the Blogs, I only see the ‘pending approval’ posts for the one the page is defaulting to, which is the last one that posted. To see the ‘pending approval’ posts for another account, I pretty much have to change the form and leave a new comment as a different name and e-mail pair, before they become visible. Not much of an issue, provided comments don’t get hung up forever awaiting moderation. But it can be a pain. It would be nice if one could log in and have it change the page view accordingly.
Also, we REALLY need some way to preview our replies, and to be able to go back and edit our replies after we make them! The current reply system is ‘fire and forget’. Once you post, it’s there forever. No way to correct a typo, or retract material posted in error.
I still do NOT see these Blogs as being an improvement for communication. They are difficult to browse through, difficult to reply to, and impossible for anyone other than a Linden to raise issues on, no matter how critical the need. Perhaps it would help if the list of approved Linden Blog Authors or the header for your Blog entries somehow also included an e-mail link, so residents could e-mail you directly? So, for example, if I wanted to ask Robin Linden to create a new blog entry to discuss a criitical new issue, I had some way to rapidly find Robin’s e-mail address?
For browzing the blogs, is there any way at all to collapse the list to just blog title, author name, number of replies and date of last reply? Having to skip over all those first paragraphs in each entry makes for a lot of scrolling. It’s even worse in the blog replies for a single entry. Try reading the replies to Robin’s ‘forums are closing’ blog entry, and scrolling through the full text of over 160 replies, to find the three or four new entries… Some of which might NOT be at the bottom of the list, if they were held up a while for moderation!
August 14th, 2006 at 7:35 AM
One more point: The Second Life logo at the top of a blog entry page does not consistently link back to the main SL website. In some cases it does, but on this very blog entry’s page, it has no link. That needs to be fixed.
August 14th, 2006 at 8:27 AM
*reads carefully*
Those are a lot of great suggestions, Ceera! I’d like to take the time to investigate this further.
You already know that you can subscribe to the Official Linden Blog via email per:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/08/11/subscribe-to-the-official-linden-blog-by-email/
so that transforms it into a standard email newsletter, and you don’t even have to come here.
One point I should make super-obvious about important issues is, tons already come to my email box–they may not be seen publicly, which is what I want to raise visibility about. My recent posts are all in response to things like that. I have no shortage of feedback… infact I have a massive backlog I am working through, hopefully as timely as possible, this week!
I also think it’d be great to have 1) more info about each Linden (like a profile) and 2) email points of contact, just like you said.
I don’t know a way to collapse… but… THANXIES for your suggestions. I believe the more the blog gets used, the need will drastically increase to streamline info to present key points, so you can expand at your convenience.
And that’s what we want to do–keep it easy.
Re: “One more point”, on this page, I still see the Second Life logo links to “http://www.torley.com”. Perhaps I am looking at something different? Just let me know.
August 14th, 2006 at 12:35 PM
Hi Torley,
This is a picture of the part of the header I am talking about. At least it should be, if this Blog accepts an HTML IMG tag…
In the picture above, click on the position shown by the red dot. On most of the SL website, that will take you to http://secondlife.com. It does not do so on this blog page. But if you click the link under it, on the words “What Is Second Life?”, and then click on the same point in the header, that works as expected.
August 14th, 2006 at 12:36 PM
OK… It didn’t allow me to post the image. You can look at the illustration at this URL:
http://www.polyhedrongroup.com/2life/SL-Logo.jpg
August 14th, 2006 at 1:48 PM
Ooh! Just noticed something! If you mouse over the header banner in the Blogs, when the mouse if over “Your World. Your Imagination.”, you get a link to http://secondlife.com, but NOT when it’s over the logo at the left. On the SL website and forums, it is exactly the opposite! No link on the “Your World. Your Imagination.” part near the middle, but there IS a link on the SL logo at the left end!
It needs to be fixed so it’s consistent. Having the site logo link to the home page is pretty much expected web page behavior on the Internet.
August 14th, 2006 at 1:54 PM
^ I’m seeing a problem in Internet Explorer where the header appears misaligned and, like yourself, I can’t click on the “Second Life” logo–but it affects the whole image for me:
http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/8554/misalignedheaderen8.png
I’ll investigate further. Looks right in Firefox and Safari.
August 14th, 2006 at 2:23 PM
Thanks Torley. It was on IE with my Windows 2000 SP2 laptop at work that I saw that glitch. And yes, on Safari with a Mac, I see it looks just fine. Odd…
December 7th, 2006 at 1:38 PM
Can someone comment on the Second Life logo and what it signifies?
January 23rd, 2007 at 11:01 AM
Hi! Why I can’t fill my info in profile? Can somebody help me?
My login is Kisakookoo!
February 1st, 2008 at 11:34 PM
pos yourgirls
March 18th, 2008 at 7:11 PM
very nice web site. My English is not so good, so I do not understandt it well, but it seems very good. Thanks
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:53 PM
[...] or part of my considered official canonicity, but nevertheless, it is real. It exists. And you can watch my "How to Use This Blog" Video Tutorial for a trip back into [...]
October 7th, 2008 at 6:06 AM
Great blog. I like layout!!!!