Frequently asked questions
Introduction
This FAQ file is intended as an introduction to The Next Agenda website and community. It includes an overview of the site, a guide to reading and posting diaries and comments, and answers to some frequently asked questions.What is The Next Agenda?
The Next Agenda (TNA) is a progressive, reality-based website and community for discussing Canadian politics. It owes its origins to Daily Kos, the leading American political blog founded by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga. The Next Agenda is not affiliated with Daily Kos but the site is designed to function in the same way and many users are registered on both blogs. The Next Agenda favours a political philosophy of progress toward better conditions for all Canadians. We respect the rights, opinions and practices of others. We embrace new ideas and positive change. We uphold human rights, women’s rights, reproductive rights, environmentalism, multiculturalism, universal healthcare and education. The Next Agenda does not represent a specific political party but supports political candidates and elected representatives who demonstrate a commitment to progressive ideals. The Next Agenda is a place for sharing ideas, informed and civilized debate, and rousing the community to action. It is not a place for hateful comments, bigotry, authoritarianism or unwarranted smear campaigns. Canadians are interested and informed about a wide variety of topics, including international affairs, especially American politics, and the NA diaries reflect a broad range of interests.Navigating the site
The main page is divided into 3 columns: menus in the left-hand column, front-page articles in the centre, and ads on the right. The menus include a general menu which links you to the home page and special pages, your menu to change your preferences, post a diary, read your hotlist, and so on, the Recommended diaries and the Recent Diaries list. You can open up a diary to read and comment on it by clicking on the diary title. The front-page articles are opened by clicking of the "There's more" link at the bottom of the introduction. The ads are placed on the front page to help generate income to support the site. Ads help defray the cost of advertising and maintaining the site, ensuring that your experience of The Next Agenda is full of lots of interaction with numerous interesting registered users and as glitch-free as possible.How can I post here?
First, you need to create an account. The registration link is at the bottom of the page, or you can click here. Choose a username, fill in the rest of the fields, and send in the form. You will get a return email confirming your registration and then you're all set.Do not select the name of a living well known person as your user name unless it is your own. Creating the impression that you are such a person when you are is grounds for automatic banning.
You have to be logged into the site to post a comment or write a diary.Posting a comment
If you want to comment in a diary, click on the diary title under the menu "Recent Diaries" on the left-hand side. When the diary is opened, you may want to make a comment directly to the diarist, in which case you would select "Post a comment" at the bottom of the diary, or you may want to comment on another comment by selecting "Reply to this comment" under the specific comment you are responding to. You can determine whether someone "posted a comment" or "replied to a comment" according to the amount of indentation of the comment. Comments posted to the diarist are aligned with the left margin. Comments in reply are indented below the comment they are replying to. Sometimes in very active comment sections, also called threads, the comments seem to jump around to all levels of indentation but you can actually trace back replies to the preceding comment that is one less indented space.Posting a diary
A diary is your opportunity to highlight a particular topic, event, newsitem or concern. Your diary should be supported by fact, which you can indicate by adding links (explained below in the formatting section), unless you clearly indicate that it is an opinion piece. Some very fine bloggers excel at opinion pieces, or rants. If what you want to say amounts to only 1 paragraph, then rather than make it into a diary, post it as a comment in an Open Thread. Open Threads are diaries in which anyone can post a comment about any subject. They appear on the front page regularly.Do not post a diary if you have no intention of responding to the comments your diary generates.
If you cannot be around for the hour or two after posting mention it in the diary or in a comment below it, along with some idea of when you will be around to post.
Users who make a habit of drive by postings, without participating in the discussion may be subject to automatic banning.
Limit the amount of content that is copied from another source to the minimum, generally 2 or 3 paragraphs. Include a link to the source.
Generally, if you have nothing to add to a quote from a linked source then you don't have enough for a diary. Either think about it until you do, or see if someone else has posted a diary on the subject already and then jump into the discussion with what you do have.
You post a diary by clicking on the "Click New Diary Entry" link in the menu under your username on the lefthand side. This brings you to a form that has separate fields for the title, tags, introduction and body of your diary.
You can either compose your diary directly in these fields or you can write it in a word processing program like Word and cut and paste your text to the fields. I usually try to have all of the articles that I want to link to in my diary open in separate windows while I am creating my diary so I can easily jump back and forth between the articles and my diary to cut and paste quotes and links. Once you have composed your diary, the only button available is the Preview button. This will show you what your diary will look like and provides a good opportunity to make sure you remembered to put in your links, text effects and so on. It is a good idea to leave an extra space between your paragraphs and to keep your paragraphs fairly short (usually around 4 or 5 lines); this makes it much easier to read your text on a monitor. After you have previewed your diary, then remember to hit the Submit button, or your diary won't be posted. If you forget to hit the submit button, you can usually hit the Back button at the top lefthand corner of the webpage to get back to the diary creation page and retrieve your text.Editing and updating your diary
You can still make changes to your diary after you have posted (or submitted) it. Click on your diary on the Recent Diary list to open it up. At the bottom of the diary, just above the comments, is a text box with the title of your diary, "Post a Comment" and "Edit Diary." Only the diary author and the site admins can edit posted diaries. Click on "Edit Diary" and you will see your whole diary in the fully formatted form, and below that, the diary submission fields that you originally used. Make the changes in the submission fields. If you are just correcting typos or putting in links or text effects that you'd forgotten, then just click the Update button when you are done. Sometimes, you want to add new information or links to the diary. In that case, it is worth indicating that you have updated the information in your diary. Add the word Update or Updated to the title of your diary and put [UPDATE] before the new text to get an automatic timestamp. If you use [UPDATE] to create a timestamp, the new paragraph will appear as: Update [2006-8-7 16:45:20 by (your username)]:{followed by the new information you added to diary} By the same token, putting [ED] before the new text will give a timestamp like this: Editor's note [2006-8-7 16:45:20 by (editor's username)]:{New text added to diary} I don't expect that we will see a lot of editor's notes on this blog because editing would only be done with the permission of the diary author and would probably be mentioned in the comment thread. Remember to hit the Update button after you make any changes to your posted diaries.Rating comments and diaries
Under each comment your will see a rectangle to rate the comment. Within the rectangle, you can scroll using the arrow at the right-hand end to 1: Strongly disagree, 2: Disagree, 3: Read your comment, 4: Good, 5: Superlative. Every once in a while you come across a comment that really hits the mark either because of the content or the way it is expressed. Those comments deserve a 5 but, please, only give out 5's in exceptional circumstances. Trusted Users also have the choice of 0: Hide comment. Once you have rated a comment or all of the comments in the thread that you want to rate, click on the "Rate All" button. Why do we rate comments? Well, apart from showing that we have read them, it is a way to give mojo to each other. Mojo is a magical quality. When you have sufficient amounts of it, you become a trusted user or TU. TUs help to moderate the site by voting to hide comments that are disruptive to the site or hateful (berating or cursing another user, making ugly comments of a sexual, racial or cultural nature). It is trollish behavior to make such comments and people who make them consistently are considered trolls and may be banned from the site. When you open up a diary, you will see buttons to "Recommend" and "Unrecommend" the diary in the top left-hand corner. By recommending a diary you like, you are helping to get the diary on the Recommended list, which will encourage others to read it. Occasionally, it will be necessary to troll-rate a diary but please reserve the "Unrecommend" button for a diary that is hateful or plagiarized, rather than one you disagree with.Formatting text
Formatting text using the preset buttons
This site supports a number of HTML commands to create different text effects but the easiest thing to do is to use the 6 buttons that appear just above the box that you write your text into. If you hold your mouse over each button, you will see that their functions are as follows: Bold, Italics, Underline,Example 1
<strong>Stephen Harper</strong> won a minority government in the 2006 election
which would look like this in the preview and the posted comment:Example 2
Stephen Harper won a minority government in the 2006 election
Example 1 shows how the formatting is written out in code in your text.Links
Links connect the text that you are writing with an internet address so people can click on your words and go to the exact site you used as a reference. To make a link, type your text including a word or words that refer to the site you are linking, highlight the words and click on the link button. A little window will open up that reads "Enter URL:" with a rectangle below that starts with "http:". Here is where you would enter in the full web address for the site you are linking to, then press the Okay button.Now if you are really thinking ahead, you would have several windows open on your internet browser (under the File menu at the top of the page, the first choice is Open New Window). In one window, you have The Next Agenda open and this is where you would be making your comment. In another window, you would have the website that you want to reference. You can jump back and forth from The Next Agenda to other websites without losing unfinished work just by clicking on the buttons at the bottom of the page. Open up the page of the website you want to link to. See the address in the address box at the top of the page? Right-click on it and choose copy. Then click on the button for The Next Agenda at the bottom of the page and go to your "Enter URL" window and right-click on the "http:" and press paste. Make sure you haven't duplicated the "http:" bit. You can just delete the extra characters if necessary. Press "Okay" and you should have something like this:I love to blog about <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/6/24/9022/88866">gardening.</a>
which would turn into this:I love to blog about gardening.
Blockquoting
The 6th button is the blockquote button. Blockquoting is a really elegant way to highlight text, especially a quote or a reference. Write your comment, including writing out your quote, or you can cut and paste the quote from the original document. If you are commenting on what the diarist has said, you can select the text within the diary (hold down the left mouse button and drag it across all the words you want to quote), right-click on the selected words, choose copy, then move the mouse down to your comment, right-click and choose paste. Next, select the text again and click on the blockquote button, and what you'll get will be something like this:<blockquote>"Blockquoting is a really elegant way to highlight text"</blockquote>
which will end up looking like this:"Blockquoting is a really elegant way to highlight text"
Formatting text using HTML commands
You may choose to apply the above text effects by writing out the code yourself rather than using the buttons. The template for the basic syntax is as follows:<COMMAND>your text here</COMMAND>
- where <COMMAND> indicates where to start the effect you want
- "your text here" indicates the text to be formatted
- and, </COMMAND> indicates where to stop applying the effect you want, also called closing the command
| COMMAND | EFFECT |
|---|---|
| b | bolds text |
| strong | bolds text |
| i | italicizes text |
| em | emphasizes text, usually by italicizing it |
| u | underlines text |
| s | puts a strikethrough line through text |
| blockquote | puts a block a text into a box with a shaded background |
| cite | italicizes text, used to display a citation or quote |
| tt | displays text in a typewriter font |
| code | displays text in a uniformly spaced font, similar to typewriter text |
How to post an image
The first thing to do is to upload your digital images to a photoalbum such as Photobucket. This one works for sure. Once you have your pic uploaded to your photoalbum site, you are ready to link to it in your diary or comment.On Photobucket, under the image you will see 3 lines of code. The top one is the exact url of your image. Copy this to plug into your HTML.
The HTML code goes like this:
<IMG SRC="http://exact url of your image">
That's it.
Of course, there are a few refinements, which I will explain below.
Image sizing and hotlinking
Unlike text, images require a significant amount of network bandwidth to transmit. To minimize the impact of images, there are two things to keep in mind: don't hotlink images, and keep the file size small. A hotlink is when you find an image somewhere on the web and plug its URL directly into a IMG tag. When you do this, every time your diary or comment is loaded, that external site has to supply a copy of the image.
That can amount to a significant load (and cost) to the host site. If you want to use an image, proper behavior is to upload a copy of the image to a hosting service such as photobucket, and to include a link to the original site. That way, the original site gets credit for the image, but doesn't have to bear the bandwidth load. Note also that many images are copyrighted; copying without permission is a violation of copyright law.
For images under your control (photos that you took, for instance), you can reduce the bandwidth load on everyone by decreasing the file size as much as possible before uploading to the web. Try to keep image sizes below 50 kilobytes; below 20 is better. Dropping the resolution to 640x480 in an image editor and saving as a jpeg with a low quality setting (high compression setting) will help a lot in reducing file sizes.
HTML Codes
This site supports only a few of the HTML codes that could be applied to images. These are border, alt, align, width, height. You do not have to use every code every time you post an image, just the ones you need.
I'll explain each one, then show you how to put them into your HTML.
Border
You can specify whether you want a black border around you images, and the width you want it to be in pixels.
Alt
Alt means alternative text for the image. Some people will look at this site with the images turned off to avoid being slowed down, so alt provides them with a text marker where the image would be.
Align
This determines where the image sits on the page. Your choices include left, right, middle, top, texttop, absmiddle, baseline, bottom, absbottom.
Width and Height
These parameters specify the dimensions of the image in pixels. You can define either one, both or neither.
Here is how you add these characteristics to your images:
<IMG SRC="http://exact">http://exact url of your image" border=1 alt="brief title" align=left height=250 width=250>
