New ViveLeCanada Features.

In a main page story, you can rate the story, 1-5 stars, by dragging your mouse over the stars.

There are 2 ways to submit stories.

In the menu at the top of the page, select 'News' then 'Submit Article'. These will be moderated and released as they always have been. (Be sure not to quote more than 1/3 of the original article, and post the URL if it is not an original article). Members can split the article into 'Summary/Intro' and 'Body', something I had to do before. The 'Summary/Intro' part is what is read on the front page, and the 'Body' is what is seen when people hit 'Read More >>'

Or:

Click on 'Forums' in the Menu. Go under a Forum sub heading (eg: 'Humour' under 'Just for Fun'), then click on "Newtopic" on the top right of the page. These will be moderated later, but will appear immediately on the 'Recent Topics' part of the Forum, and the 'Forum Posts' section of the front page.

It will also appear on the 'Recent Topic Scroll' and 'Posts Since Last Visit' part of CanadaKA.

Regardless if the submission is for the main page, or forums, the comments always end up in the forums. Main Page comments end up in 'Editorial Discussions' part of the forum on both sites.

Thanks for doing those Dr Caleb, well done.
I still have to make some icons for the Vive Board of Directors group so there isn't a broken image. One other image that can appear beside your avatar is your sports team, if you have selected one in your profile.

If you are on dialup or find all these extras annoying, you do have the option to disable some individually in your profile, or you can enable "lite forum" which is designed to strip the forums down to the bare bones, mostly for people on dialup.

Something also to note. For members that contribute a regular "column" on Vive, they have a special menu item called "Columns". When viewing the column, there is a box in the top right with the columnists info. This info is taken from there profile. If this person adds a "personal pic" it will be displayed here, along with anything they add to the "min-bio" field.

A few comments on the “submit” articles methods. I recognize that we are now (hopefully) taking a little load off of the editors by selecting the “front page” bit and the “read more” bit but have a couple of observations. The first being that when one goes to “read more” you do not see the “front page” bit at the top, I find this ….. disconcerting! I recently submitted an article (from an identified news source, and put the title and a brief bit on the “front page” and then submitted the first 1/3 to ½ to the “read more” page INCLUDING THE TITLE AND FIRST FEW PARAGRAPHS put on the “front page”. It was edited to EXCLUDE the bit on the “front page” and the remainder was severely trimmed so that “read more” consisted of one paragraph and the link provided to the full article. This is similar to most other “external” articles submitted.

As a dial up user I must ask that a reasonable part of the article (within the usual guidelines) appears on the “read more” so that I can decide to follow the link or not, in that some links may take 5 or more minuets to get to the article, after loading all the banners, logo, advertising crap, flashing do dads and so on that web masters now insist upon us viewing before we see the content. Also I see no reason why when I go to “read more” why I should have to page back in order to review the first part of the article. This is, IMHO, a poor cousin of what we had before! I have not checked back but it seems that the search engine (google) will send you to the partial article also (unless you can locate the “print friendly” page) and I could not find a way to get to the entire article from such a searched page.

Sorry to be difficult, I am merely voicing some of the difficulties I am having in the hope that either someone can clarify things or it will lead to some improvements. I am trying desperately to come to terms with the move and recognize that both sides are still “working on it”. I have many more “suggestions” but am holding off until things settle down a bit. On this one I would hope we would start off as we mean to go on, and if this is the standard then us dial uppers may as well go elsewhere unless we have all day to follow those links just to see if the thing is worth reading!!

Do you find the new site faster on dialup? It should be, the old vive site was loading very slowly for me the last few months, even on highspeed. the new site also has a smaller footprint and more optimizations for loading faster.

But with that said, looking at the web stats only an estimated 3% of visitors to this site are on dialup

I also have a feature for the forums called "lite forum" which is mainly for dialip users, it disables lots of the forum features and graphics.

The submit page is designed to be this way, the text entered in the "Summary" box is just that, a summary of the article. Often people choose to just place the first few paragraphcs as the summary rather than writing one, which is fine. But submitters shoudl be aware that the summary text is not displayed on the article page. So if they are placing the first few paragrahs as the summary, they will have to repeat this text in the "Story Text".

People submitting stories will have to get used to the new format. I can enable an indicator of how long the "read more" content is from the homepage. Something like (256 words) I didn't include this to keep things less cluttered.

Feel free to bring up any more suggestions, your not being difficult.

For the dialip users this is the tests I ran from http://tools.pingdom.com

Old Vive homepage: 28 items (149 KB) 10.2 seconds
New Vive homepage: 25 items (103.4 KB) 1.4 seconds

I use something on canadaka.net called a CDN from www.cachefly.net that makes images load faster, but it costs money. If vive was interested in paying a small monthly fee I could setup this site with a CDN.

-So if they are placing the first few paragrahs as the summary, they will have to repeat this text in the "Story Text". -

Exactly, which is what I did in MY submission but it got "edited", dont know why?

It does load quite fast in the lite fourum and I have no problem with the speed that this fourum loads at. Unfortunatly us 3%ers are often forgoten and I do apreciate your efforts to keep the site "lite" as was the old vive site by comparison with many of the sites linked to. All I can do is ask the contributors and editors to include enough content on these pages to give us "slow ones" (be that connection or brain!!) as much of the article as possible before relying upon that link to the origional article.

It looks as though the 'Preview' part is front page only, and the 'story text' is read more>> only. I think we can quote more in the 'Preview' part, as it won't show in the 'read more' link.

Gess we are all on the learning curve, still liked the old way better when the preview and body were added together when we "read more"......ah well

well you can make the articles look the same wsa as before with this new method. but this new method also allows for someone to summarize the entire article if they want too. If no one likes it this way I can be changed.

It's just fine Trev. I just have to learn how to use the new system.

If anyone else has difficulty - speak up!

I'm on dial-up and always have been. (Have no choice for now--waiting for at least one of three nearby companies to expand out here, will prob take another couple of months). I find the site loads much faster for me and is way easier to use as a result.

I'm still getting the hang of the new formats for submitting and editing articles as well.

One question I have is about editorials. How exactly are things ending up in that section? What do I need to know about editorials and how that works?