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NN 2.0 Tips

A Note to Lurkers

Do you read Niners Nation, but aren't a member?  No problem, that's cool.  But there's more to being a member than commenting, and it's surprisingly easy to sign up, since we accept already-existing Yahoo IDs and Open IDs.  What are those additional benefits?

  • The number of new comments for front page Stories (and Fanshots and Fanposts) is listed next to the number of total comments on the front page and the archives page.  You'll always know when there's something added to the discussion without having to remember how many total comments there were last time you visited.
  • When you're on a post page, new comments have a slightly yellow background and you can easily jump to new comments by hitting the "z" key.  You'll never have to scroll looking for new comments again.  Plus, new comments are added live, so there's no reason to refresh pages.This is especially helpful during our round by round coverage.
  • If you are a member of multiple SBN blogs, there is a drop-down menu at the top of the screen that lists all your blogs and how many new Stories, FanPosts, and FanShots have been posted since the last time you visited each blog.  You can even select some blogs as favorites and they'll show up at the top of your list.

If you do decide to create an account and post a few comments, there are some additional nifty tools to help keep you organized.

  • By going to your profile page (click on your name at the top of the screen) you can see the last fifty or so comments you've left across all SBN blogs and how many replies there to your comment.  It's a great way to keep track of conversations you've recently been a part of.
  • Also on your profile page, you can click on Blog to see all the Stories, FanShots, and FanPosts you've posted across all SBN blogs.  This is handy for looking at other users' Blogs as well, if you're a fan of their work.  You can even RSS their stuff across all blogs in one feed.  This feature is useful even if you're not a member.

If you can think of any other reasons to join the site feel free to post them here.

(Hat tip to Brickhaus at Bad Left Hook (boxing) and Sky Kalkman at Beyond the Boxscore (sabermetrics) for putting this together first)

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NN 2.0 Tech Tips - "Tags" and "Recommended"

First off, I've shamelessly stolen this idea from Mile High Report.  I was skimming around SBN and noticed that MHR did a discussion of some of the features of 2.0 not completely discussed and felt the need to do the same.  Additionally, Nineraguan had a great FanPost to which some of this could be applicable.  Before going further, remember that if you ever have any questions about a feature at NN 2.0 (or about anything else really), you can email me (email's at the bottom of the site) or you can post a FanShot or comment in an existing front page post or FanPost and one of the veteran SBN readers or I will certainly provide whatever help we can.  And of course, if you have any questions right now you can post them here.

Recommended: If you read a FanPost or a FanShot that you particularly like, you can recommend it to everybody else.  How?  Well, check out Nineraguan's "Boring is Beautiful" FanPost.  He clearly put some effort into this and has come up with some interesting insights into our so-called boring draft.  Normally I would promote something like that to the front page but I want to leave it as a FanPost to emphasize the value of recommending it.  After reading the story, just before the comments section you'll see an option to recommend a FanPost.  Additionally if you've clicked recommend and change your mind for whatever reason, you can unrecommend it.  If 4 people recommend a FanPost it will get bumped up to section titled Recommended FanPosts.  Right now the only FanPost there is the one welcoming everybody to NN 2.0.  I know some people will throw up a +1 when they recognize a good story, so this is a way to take it to another level.  If you still want them to know you're the one recommending, feel free to leave a comment as well.

Tags: Tags are meant to make the search process easier and interconnect things on NN within the site itself and with the rest of SB Nation.  I use tags for front page posts but you can use them in FanPosts as well.  How do you tag an article?  When you've clicked Create a New FanPost the next screen provides the space on the left to type your FanPost.  On the right side of the screen you'll see "tags," "teams" and "players" among other things.  In tags you can type just about anything.  For example, if you do a FanPost about the draft and comparing it to last year's draft, you could tag it NFL Draft, 2007, 2008, or something like that.

The teams and players tags are useful as well for this kind of thing.  For example, in the front page post on the kickers for the All-Time 49ers I discussed Joe Nedney.  Well I went down to Players and typed in Joe Nedney to tag him to the story.  The teams and players options take away the need of typing in the individual players name under tags (hopefully that makes sense).  One cool thing with this is it's connection to the 49ers roster listed in the left column below our various links and above the google ads.  If you go to that and click on Joe Nedney, his page will include any stories tagged with his name.

Events Tag: This specific tag is an additional one I wanted to point out separately.  If you write a FanPost discussing something about the 49ers opener against Arizona, you can attach the game event itself.  If you do an off-topic post about the Giants-A's Bay Bridge series this summer you can tag it with that event, even though we're a football site.  As people are looking for doing searches for info on that event, you're FanPost discussing it will come up.  As something like this comes up, I'll try and point to an example.

In the meantime, if you click on the title of this post and go to the bottom (before the comments section) you'll see a Read Related section that includes various tags including: "San Francisco 49ers," "mile high report," tags, recommended, help, tips and "tech tips."  I also tagged Joe Nedney (since he's discussed in here).  If you click on the tag "Joe Nedney (K-SFX)" it'll take you to his page here on NN.  During the season his game stats will be listed, but for now it lists some basic info, as well as the All-Time 49ers kicker article.  Finally, you'll see a link there titled "MHR Tech Tips (Mile High Report)."  That's the post that gave me the idea to do this so I used the "Related" section where you can "Add Related Item."

I'm guessing not everyone will get as excited about this as me, but hopefully you're able to enjoy all the new features.  As we move into the summer I'll try and post these every so often.  Also, I've created a new section called NN 2.0 Tips where these will be posted.  You can go to the different sections on the top left side of the page.  Enjoy and if you have any questions, post them here or feel free to email me (again, email listed at the bottom of the page).

Editor's Note 3:35pm - And don't forget the polls are still open to vote for the kicker on our All-Time 49ers Team

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"This is the last time our season ends in December." -- New 49ers president Jed York after announcing the signing of Mike Singletary to a long term deal.
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