Category: Geeks r Us
Hi all,
I would like to announce to everyone that the luv2bablyndi.net web site has officially become a new community where blind and visually impaired people can hang out! For those of you familiar with the site, you know it used to be a very small site with a very limitted feature set. Now, This site is a community where people can have fun and get away from all the stressful parts of life. Users can meet new people, post to our message boards, create personal home pages or profiles, create their own blogs, take quizzes and more! If you want to check it out, just go to www.luv2bablyndi.net and go from there.
We offer the following cool features to our users:
The Wiki: This is an environment where the users can create and edit their own personal home pages / profiles. Links to wikipages are created automatically using capitalized words smashed together (e.g., WikiPage). A special editing syntax is used to provide features such as bold text, images, external links, etc. A history is kept for each page so users and admins can view diffs and rollback a page to a previous version if a user breaks their page. The Tiki Wiki system has all the normal features Wikis have plus a lot more. Users may use Wiki syntax or regular HTML in their pages / profiles. If HTML is used, you can even create blogs and home pages with music, audio profiles and other cool elements!
Image Galleries: Image galleries are collections of images. Users can create galleries and upload images to private or public galleries. You can select the number of thumbnails to appear in gallery rows/files as well as the thumbnail's size. Thumbnails are automatically created by our system; you don't have to upload them. Galleries can be used for albums, stories, showrooms, and many other applications.
Articles and submissions: The articles & submissions system allows editors to publish articles in a Content Management System (CMS). Articles can belong to a topic and topics can be administered by our editors and admins. The articles can use an image or the topic image. You can set the publishing date of any article--allowing you to program articles for the future. The article content can use the Wiki syntax or regular HTML. Links and images in articles are automatically cached to prevent content that resides in other pages from disappearing. The CMS system also accepts submissions. Users can send proposed articles and the editors can edit, remove, or approve submissions as articles. There is an articles home page where the last n articles are shown. The number of articles that can be shown is configurable.
Blogs: Blogs are great and they are very popular today. A weblog is a collection of posts ordered by date. It's like a journal on the web. A post can be a comment about something the user did, a review, a thought, anything. Our Blogs system is quite powerful. Users can create blogs and, of course, post entries into private or public blogs. Our system also implements the Blogger XMLRPC interface, allowing you to use applications such as wBloggar or Blogbuddy to manage and edit weblogs.
File Galleries: The file galleries section of the site is a very flexible download manager. You can create/edit file galleries, which are collections of files. Statistics are recorded for each download. Rankings are defined for the top-downloaded files, most-visited file galleries, and last-uploaded files. You can also check last-changed file galleries, last-uploaded files, top-downloaded files and top-visited file galleries. Users can use this feature to distribute free content they have created, such as audio files, etc. Users can also post demos of free accessible games and other useful software for the blind community to use. Note: Please do not bother uploading files containing viruses; we have anti-virus software on our server to prevent such attacks. If a user suspects a file is harmful, they can use the "contact us" link on the site navigation menu and ask the admins to examine the file. The admins will test the file and inform the user on what action to take in regards to that particular file. Note that if you upload something that is found to be harmful to a user's computer system, you will be banned without notice; this is your one and only warning!
Featured Links: The featured links section displays links that people request to be placed on our site. This is useful if you are interested in promoting a product or your web site. Just use the "contact us" link to submit your link to be placed on the site. Please make sure to include the site URL, a description of what it is you are promoting, and a reason for your submission.
Comments: Comments are used to provide user-feedback to many of our site's features. Users can comment on Wiki pages, image galleries, file galleries, articles and polls. A karma system maintains a level for each user. The level improves when a user comment is voted on by another user. Good qualified users votes add more points to a comment than users who didn't get good qualifications. Users can control how to sort votes, the number of votes to see by page and the minimum threshold (score) for a vote to be displayed.
Forums: Forums are an important part of a community site. The forums section gives you access to all of our message boards. Users can discuss almost any topic they can think of with other users. Editors and admins can create new forums and manage topics and posts.
Chat Rooms: Admins and editors can create chat channels that users can join. Once in a channel, users post messages that are broadcast to all the users in the same chatroom. Chatroom messages are updated at a given interval that can be configured for each chat channel by the admins or editors.
Polls: Polls can be created to allow users to vote on something. Users can vote in any poll that is not closed, examine old polls and view poll stats.
FAQs: Our FAQs section contains common questions asked by our users on how to use certain features of the site. Before contacting us for support, please check to see whether your question has already been answered in our FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section.
Quizzes: Quizzes can be used for fun, for trivia or for contests. A quiz is made of a number of multiple-choice questions, each option in a question can be assigned positive or negative points. After the user takes a quiz, our system computes the score and an answer can be displayed to the user depending on his or her score. If you are an admin or an editor, you can control if quizzes can be repeated and you can indicate a time limit for quizzes. If you want, quiz results can be stored and you can review the results. Statistics are always stored for quizzes--keeping track of the results of each quiz. Please note that users cannot create quizzes on their own; they must submit a quiz to an admin or an editor to be entered into our system. This has been done to save disk space on our system. Quizzes that are not taken by any user will be deleted after ninety days. If you want to submit a quiz to us, you are welcome to do so at any time. Simply click on "contact us" on the site navigation menu and send your quiz to the admins. Alternatively, you may submit a quiz to an editor if you see them online; your request will sometimes be processed faster that way. When submitting a quiz, please make sure to include all of the following information: The name of the quiz and a description of what the quiz you are submitting is about. Also, for each question, please make sure to include the question itself, all of the possible answers for that question, and the point value for that question. Also, please tell us whether you want your quiz to have a time limit, and if so, how long. Specify whether or not your quiz can be taken more than once by a user and whether you want the stats for your quiz to be stored in our system.
RSS Feeds: Our system is remarkably flexible when it comes to RSS. It can display external RSS feeds from other sites and syndicate its activities (blogs, articles, forums, Wiki and galleries) via RSS.
Surveys: Surveys can be used to gather the opinion of users. If you are an admin or an editor, you can create surveys using different question formats: short-text questions, multiple-choice questions, single-choice questions and two different rate questions. Users can fill in the surveys and then you and they can check the survey's statistical results. Users can submit surveys to an admin or an editor to be used on the site; just use the "contact us" link or send your survey to a site editor.
Web Site Directory: The directory organizes Web links into convenient categories--similar to the dmoz open directory project. Yahoo! Users can browse link descriptions--navigating the categories by drilling down to increasingly specific sub-categories. Or they may search for specific text. Users can also suggest links they would like to see added to our directory; just click on the submit a link link under the directory links on our site. We would like to build a comprehensive list of links to any blind or visually-impaired related sites on the internet, so if a site you want there is not in our directory, please tell us about it! Admins, or editors can validate user suggestions before they are posted. An unlimited number of categories can be created and they can be related to one another--encouraging users to move from one to another. Our system tracks the addition of new links and the amount of traffic they attract. Users can view the top-ranked new sites and cool sites (heavy traffic sites) by clicking a button.
Ephemerides: The ephemerides section can be used to associate one or many images and/or texts for each day of the year. Users can then browse the associated information for a particular day and a module can be used to display the information for the current day. This can be used to display comic strips, quotes, national holidays, and many other ideas.
Shoutbox: Our shoutbox allows users to post instant comments about anything and communicate with each other; it's much like a graffiti feature. Admins and editors can edit and remove messages from the shoutbox at any time.
Search: Comb through our site to find just the information you want. Search picks through forums, image/file galleries, link directories, CMS articles, blogs and Wiki pages to find the terms you specify. And our system compiles search statistics for the admins so that they may keep an eye on what users want from us. There are two forms of searching: regular and full text. Full-text searching sorts results by the relevance of the match to the search query. Also, search results will be ordered first by relevance, and then by section (Wiki, blog, etc.). Regular, non-full-text searching continues to sort first by section, and then by hits.
Live Support: Yes, that's right, we have a feature that most other communities out there don't have; live support! When an admin or a site editor is on the site, you can talk to them live and get help if you are having trouble with something! Simply click the linked image under the Live Support section of the site and a new window will open allowing you to specify why exactly you need assistance. Your request will then be placed in the queue and the next available operator (admin or site editor) will assist you with whatever it is that you need.
MyTiki: Logged-in users can enjoy many convenient features in the MyTiki section. All of these features can be enabled/disabled by admin. Some features can't be offered to users without a login name and password, so they are only present when a user has logged in to our system using a valid username and password. The features that are available to registered users are grouped in the MyTiki section.
Webmail: The Webmail feature provides a Web interface for users' email accounts. Users can set an account by indicating the POP3 and SMTP servers to use. Then they will be able to read mails, send mails, manage attachments, manage contacts and other regular Webmail features. Our system can read and write HTML based emails as normal Webmail programs do.
Inter-User Messages: Users can send messages to other users and read/reply/remove messages in their mailboxes. Messages can have a priority setting and the user may choose to be notified by email when important messages are received. The user can close his or her mailbox from this user preferences screen and he or she will not receive messages. Messages can be flagged for follow up. Admins can send broadcast messages to all the users on our site.
Notepad: Using the notepad users can write, upload, download and read notes. Notes can be read as raw text files or as Wiki pages interpreting the Wiki markup syntax.
Tasks: User tasks let the user set-up to-do tasks and then view the current tasks, mark them as done or delete them. User can send tasks to other users, set deadline and move tasks to trash. Users can manipulate tasks, and can also view public tasks.
My Files: Users can store personal files on our site. They can upload files and then download them when they want. A quota can be setup by the admins to control the maximum size of personal files per user. Please note that we will never look at your personal files; we simply host them for those users who need a place to back-up important files.
User Calendar: The calendar can be used at user level to enter events for any date. Events can be viewed in daily or weekly views or as a list. Reminders can be used to notify the user about an event some time before it starts. The calendar can be imported and exported from CSV text files.
User Menus: Using user menus the user can add personal items to the User Menu section in the application menu. An option is provided to let the user automatically add all the top-level bookmarks to his or her personal menu.
User Preferences: User preferences let the user select all the user-level preferences for the site: personal avatar, time zone, theme, language, etc.
User Bookmarks: User bookmarks let users bookmark internal or external pages, create folders and organize their personal bookmarks in folders. Users can see their bookmarks, navigate through them, and add new bookmarks.
User Watches: User Watches monitor content that users are interested in. There is a Watches page in User preferences to organize this monitoring. Currently, blogs, Wiki pages and forums can be monitored.
Newsreader: The newsreader can be used to browse news from any NNTP (usenet) site. Users can read news and mark articles as read to know when new posts appear.
And lastly, the best part about all this is... It's totally free... we don't charge for any of our features! Also, we are looking for site editors / moderators to help manage the site when the admins are not around. If anyone is interested, please contact me and we'll go from there. If you have any questions, feel free to PM or QN me on here, or use the "contact us" link on our site to reach us.
Thanks,
Chet
Dude! You have really gone a long way from the way it was in the beginning ... I'll have to check it out.
rite. i'll check it out. it sounds a lot like the zone
Yeah thats pretty cool.
BEN.
I tried the address and got we cant find that url ..how irritating.
Just been there and I was the only visitor the site looks good but badly neglected.
hey chet, are the chat rooms text or voice chat, and is it good for dial up connection, or just broadband connection?
wonderwoman
Hi,
The chat rooms can be used by anyone regardless of connection type; it doesn't matter whether you're on ial-up or broadband.
We now offer Movable Type blog hosting for anyone wanting to setup a blog using the powerful Movable Type system (which is made by the same company that makes Live Journal). Check out our web site for more details. We also allow Wordpress blog hosting on our site, but users will have to contact us requesting a Wordpress installation for them.
Our Ventrilo server will be up later tonight, so if you've been wanting voice chat, you're in luck! Dial-up users are welcome to use our voice chat server as well if they wish. Keep checking the site often; there will be a news announcement on the site's front page when it is ready or when any kind of changes and / or updates are made to the site. The server connection details will be posted there as well.
Our on-demand music library will be up and running within the next 4-5 days.
Lastly, we are still looking for anyone interested in positions as site editors. Please contact us if you are interested.
Thanks,
Chet
One more thing I forgot to mention, the chat link on the site is text-based chat; our voice chat is separate.
Chet