Hey there, thanks for stopping by! Today we are happy to announce that as of today, this new website you’re now on is live and open for business. We decided to make this site after seeing the way Taj’s site drew visitors and acted as an effective portal for communication with others. We tried to make this website easier to use and comment on, so leave us some feedback! We're going to try to post on a regular basis, probably 2-3 times a week (much like the CaringBridge website). This is about the extent of the core functionality of the site (the posts), but there’s a few more really critical features that we're excited to tell you about, so read on! As we began the transition from the CaringBridge site to our new family site, we began to think of ways we could improve the user experience over the CaringBridge site. The two drawbacks that really stood out to us were lack of customization and interactivity. As you will soon see, the customization part has already been taken care of. We are now able to embed videos, photos, and a multitude of other content - which means more fun things for you all to look at! The interactivity features are what I’m really excited about, so I’ll tell you about that now.
In the past, we used the guestbook on CaringBridge. It was great, but other than the journal posts to you the audience, there wasn’t really any other way we could reply to the kind notes of encouragement you left - and that kind of bothered us. At the same time, we knew that a true “guestbook” could not be replicated on any other site. So, we no longer have a “guestbook” per se, but we have a solution that works equally well. That solution is a comment system that is based on the Disqus platform. From now on, “guestbook” posting will be replaced by leaving comments on the blog post of your choice (usually the most recent one). It’s a little complicated to explain, but bear with me. Here’s how it works: if you see a post that you want to leave a comment on (and we hope that you do), first click the link to go to the individual post. On our site, there are two ways to do this:
1st Way - Click the post title.
2nd Way - Scroll to the bottom of the post and click the link that says “x number of comments”
Now that you’re onto the individual post’s page, it’s time to comment! Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the box where you write a comment, and a couple of other things. You can post anonymously, but we are going to ask that every commenter be registered with Disqus in order to comment. Go to this link: Signup For Disqus to sign up for a Disqus account - and please upload some sort of picture of yourself so that you are easily identifiable (your profile picture will show up next to your comment when you post it). The beauty of this system is that you only have to make one account on Disqus, and you can post comments on both this site and Jonathan's site. That way, Jonathan as the administrator can see who’s posting what on both sites, and we all can interact alot better with each other. The other cool thing is that instead of replying to the post itself, you can also reply to an individual comment. Just click the “reply” button on that individual comment. This will be really cool because the replies will show up as threaded conversations under the post - you’ll see what we mean when you do it. Jonathan also added another neat feature: if you have a webcam, just click the “Record Video Comment” button and the site will automatically recognize your webcam and you can record a message that will then show up under all the other comments on that post. Cool, huh? And when you mouse over the persons profile picture, you can see how many posts they made and some other neat stats.
Well, that about wraps it up. There’s some other goodies - like Twitter integration and updates of our latest photos - but I’ll let you discover those on your own. In the coming weeks, we’ll try to get onto a more regular posting schedule. We’ll also be adding some features such as getting email notifications (like CaringBridge) and a browsable archive of posts, so stay tuned! There’s some other features I’ll talk about in a later post, but for now we’ll let you explore and maybe discover them. We really hope that you’ll sign up for an account and begin posting comments or even notes of encouragement, just try to make sure you have that profile picture, ok? There will be a similar update like this posted over at Jonathan's site that is tailored for that page, so be sure to go check that out too. Our family would love, love, LOVE to hear your feedback on the site because it helps us improve it - so leave us a comment or send Jonathan an email letting him know what you think. That way he can make the site easier and more fun to use, and then we all win! Be sure to ask us if you have any questions about signing up for commenting or anything like that as well. So, thanks for reading this and check back regularly for more posts, musings on life, and other fun stuff. See you out there in cyberspace!
- David, Jonathan, Emily, Elisabeth, Josiah, Daniel, and Teddy
