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How to Use this Site

If you've seen other blogs before, this site will seem pretty familiar.. While it is slightly different from most blogs in being a 'multi-author' blog, most of the layout is fairly standard..

If you haven't seen a blog before, here are a few pointers to help you get the most out of the site and the two week discussion:

Posts and How to Respond

In the centre column on the main page is where you'll find the main content of the site. Each post has a title and a body. The facilitators will start topics off by creating an initial post..

In order to get a discussion going or to see what others have said, you need to click on the link at the bottom of the specific post you are interested that says 'Comments.' This will bring up a form to allow you to post a new comment as well as any that have been posted previously.

This will be the main way dialogue happens for the next two weeks. .

 List of Recent Comments and RSS Feed

The third 'list' down on the right-hand column lists the most recent comments to he site. In addition to the comment counts at the bottom of each post It's an easy way to see what's most active.

If you don't know what an RSS feed is or an RSS aggregator, don't worry, it's something we'll introduce over the next two weeks. But if you are familiar with this aspects of blogs, you can get the URL for the RSS feed by clicking on the 'Syndicate this Site (XML)' link, also on the right-hand side. More on this later.

That should be it. We hope you'll stay tuned and join in the discussions.

See the main discussion by 'Topic'

For the purposes of facilitating this discussion we are filing every post under one of 7 topics, automatically called 'Categories' in this software. To view any of the posts in a particular topic, click on the category link on the left-hand navigation bar.

Further Reading

If you wanted to learn more about some of the design conventions of weblogs, you could do much worse than: