How to Navigate Our Site
Once you are logged in you will notice a black bar at the top of your page, this is where you access your personal information.
My Account Tab
- Activity: Here you can view the most recent activity of yourself, your friends, groups, your favorites and admins.
- Profile: Here you will be able to view how your public profile is seen, edit your profile information, change your avatar (profile picture) or change your signature (the text show underneath your posts).
- Blogs: This shows your Indie Junction blog and your personal blog (personal blog is optional and can be created at any time)
- Messages: This is your personal Indie Junction message box. From here you can check your inbox, your sent messages, compose new messages and check notices.
- Friends: Here you can see all your friends as well as pending friend requests.
- Groups: Here you will be able to view the groups that you are a part of, check out the group galleries and pending group requests you have.
- Gifts: You can view all of the gifts you have received here.
- Chat: Here you will be able to access the shoutbox and the main chat room.
- Settings: Here you will be able to tweak your general settings or which notifications you want to receive.
- Gallery: Here you can view your gallery, create a new gallery or upload pictures.
- Flickr: Here you will be able to view your flickr photo stream and your settings.
- Log out: You will be able to log out of Indie Junction here.
My Blogs Tab
Here you are able to view the blog that you created.
How to create a Blog
You will have the option of creating a new blog when you sign up for Indie Junction. If you did not do this, to create your personal blog just go to the ‘My Blogs’ tab, select ‘Create a Blog‘ and follow the instructions.
You will be able to access your Dashboard and change the theme of your blog for more personalization, manage your posts, create new ones or manage your comments.
How to create a Blog Post
Make sure you’re signed in, go to ‘My Blog‘ in the black tab, hover over your blog name and select ‘New Post‘ and post away! Make sure you add tags to your post so you can make sure that your blog post can be searched. You may reserve the rights to allow or not allow comments on your personal blog.
Notifications Tab
Here you can check notifications of friendship requests, group invitations and gifts received.
Chat Tab
Under this tab you will notice ‘Shoutbox’ and ‘Chat’. The Shoutbox is a small chat window that enables you to be involved in the chat while navigating other web pages. You are able to drag it around the window if it is in the way.
The Chat is our main chat room. It is a full window chat box with different channels that you may choose from. Each group also has its own chat channel.
How to Create a Gallery
Select My Account > Gallery > Create Gallery. Choose the type of Gallery you would like to create, Photo, Video or Audio. Photo Galleries are the most often used on Indie Junction.
*Please note, the gallery is unable to upload pictures if you are using Google Chrome, Safari or Opera browsers*
Create your Gallery name, such as Necklaces or Nature Photographs. Whatever it is that will be in this Gallery. Create a description; “These Necklaces are available now” or “These photographs are not framed but matted.”
Set the visibility of the Gallery: Public (everyone sees it), Private (only you see it), or Friends only.
Click Save Gallery and Browse. Now you can begin to browse your computer for the pictures you wish to load. When finished click Upload & Save. Only click this once and allow a few seconds for your pictures to load. The more pictures you decide to upload, the more time it takes.
Gifting
If you would like to send your friend a gift simply go to their profile page, click on ‘Gifts‘ and the gift box will open. Select the gift you wish to send and enter a message, click send! Your friend will now receive a gift notification via the notifications tab.
Karma
On each forum post and reply you will see a thumbs up and a thumbs down (right hand corner). This is similar to the ‘Like’ button on facebook. The higher the post rating the brighter yellow it will become. Karma points are given to each user based on their posting history and are visible on the user’s profile page next to the avatar called ‘Post Rating‘. Low karma scores are grey and the more karma you get the colour gradually turns to yellow. Bright yellow determines high karma, way to go! There is no prize for karma it just shows how awesome you and your posts are!
Flickr
You will be able to add your Flickr photo stream to your profile. Under Flickr account settings you will see “Please enter your flickr account NSID” there are two ways you can do this.
1) You can either go here, enter your user ID and then copy and paste.
2) Simply go to your Flickr account, click on ‘My Photostream” and your link will show up similar to this http://www.flickr.com/photos/12923114@N07/ the last part is your NSID number (12923114@N07) be sure not to include the (/) at the end of the numbers.
Groups
- Select the Community Tab
- Select Groups
- This brings you to the Group Directory Page where you can join a group or create a new group
- Click on the group you want to join and you will land on the Home Page for that group
- You will see the name of the group, a description
- And right underneath there is a button to Join Group
- Home–the main page of the group
- Gallery–this is a place where we can post pictures that relate to the scope of the group i.e. we could post photos of team treasuries
- Chat–each group has a dedicated chat channel to meet about topics salient to the scope of their group
- Calendar–each group has a calendar to record events that are specific to the group
- Forum–each group has it’s own forum so topics concerning that specific group can be posted right within that group
- Members–lists all current members of the group
- Send Invites–allows you to select people to invite to the group from your friends list
- Send Email–allows you to send an email to all members of the group
Forums
To access the forums click on the blue ‘Community‘ tab and scroll down to ‘Forums‘. Here you will see all the latest public forum posts.
If you want to do a quick forum post to a group you are a part of. Go to the forums page and click on the ‘New Topic‘ button at the top. Give your topic a title, add the content and then add tags so your post is searcheable. You will then see ‘Post in Group Forum‘ select which group you would like to post in from the drop down menu and then click on the ‘Post Topic‘ button.
*Please Note* If you are part of a private group these forum posts do not show up under here and can only be accessed by going to the actual group page and clicking on forums.
