Zaadz: How To's and FAQs

2 questions

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:37:26 -0000

1. Is it possible to turn off RSS feed for my blog so people can't subscribe to it?

2. What is Static Invitation?

mine says disabled but I don't even know what it means.

Thanks & Hugs XOXOX

Private Access

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:34:45 -0000

I have set our teen pod to private because of trolls moving in.
However this causes a problem when I invite teens in and they click to view it,
they get this message...

Access Denied

You do not have access to this page.
Possible explanations

This group is restricted to certain invited members. You can try contacting the cultivator of this group to ask for access.

Is there a way to make invitees see the description of the pod, instead of that unfriendly message?

Also,
I asked 2 questions the other day under BLOGS but nobody ever answered.
So here they are again....

1. Is it possible to turn off RSS feed for my blog so people can't subscribe to it?

2. What is Static Invitation?

mine says disabled but I don't even know what it means.

Thanks & Hugs XOXOX

Re: New to Gaia

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:56:53 -0000

I am new here and just want to say hello to everyone! Looking forward to meeting new people with like-minded attitudes.

Re: New to Gaia

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:10:59 -0000

Welcome to Gaia, DD,

We're happy you took time to introduce yourself.
We'll look forward to getting to know you.

This group you've found to post to is a "How to",
You might enjoy posting to the

Gaia Lounge and The Gaia Community to meet lots more Gaian's.

Blogging is made very easy, just by answering the daily question HERE at QnR

Be Bold & Have Fun,

Peace ON… Ladybear

Re: Private Access

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:08:03 -0000

Ladybear,

my answers below:

-- on private pods: as of now, once a pod goes private the description and and contents are not viewable. but you make a good point so i'll bring this up to our dev team and put it on our list

-- static invitation: are the link you use to when sending invites to other people. if you activate it you'll get a special link. you can send this link to invite people to Gaia. if they join, they will be registered as invited by you.

-- on blog subscription: no, you cannot completely turn off RSS subscription. however, only Gaia members who are logged in can see the subscription icon.

also note that your private and friends-only posts are not included in the subscription stream. only the public posts are included.

also remember, that your Gaia privacy level affects your RSS. if your privacy level is set to either "my friends only" or "community members only" then people won't be able to subscribe to your RSS feed even if they know that URL of your feed. Gaia filters the content in the RSS feed from there.

thanks for asking the RSS question. i'll go ahead and create a separate How To entry on this.

let me know if you have more questions.

~C

Re: Private Access

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:34:01 -0000

Thanks, ~C4!

Appreciate the clarity.

Hugs, Lb
XOOX

FAQ/HOW TO prevent losing text before posting

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:38:45 -0000

There is another thread on this Board called "Cut off text" but the subject title isn't sufficient for my purposes. ~C4 does give some of the same advice there, but this is the most complete and For Dummies version I have seen around the site about lost text.

When it appears that your text has gotten eaten (Gaia is dreaming or (p)oopsing) after you hit "post," or "send," hitting "back" button in browser IE7 has never worked for me here. You do get the textbox you were working in, but it's blank. It worked for Whitewave (dunno her browser) as per her post in the other thread, but it's never worked for me. At least give it a try, in an emergency.

Anyone who composes live online is asking for trouble, because outages/eatages haha happen at various points in the connection: your browser, your internet connect, the site itself, etc. Too many vulnerabilties.

1. At least "select"/highlight all you have written so far and then do control+c often during your writing, so you have it unless your own computer goes out. This has saved my derriere more often than I can tell you !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2. Best is to compose offline in your word processor, save every few sentences, save when done, and then copy-paste into the Gaia textbox (even if, as in my case, that means re-inserting all the paragraph breaks, grrrr.)

3. Another thing I do is keep a word processing program document window open ALSO when I am composing online, and instead of copying to my clipboard (item 1. above) I copy to that document, and hit save. Then EVEN if my own computer goes out, I am totally covered, unless the computer self-destructs.

But I don't always do it that way. It's a lot of clicks, but once you get it down, not too bad. I narrow the document window and keep it on the right just visible past my Gaia window which then I narrow a bit so it doesn't go all the way to the right of the screen, so I can click into the document window easily. Don't have to see the whole thing, just be able to get the cursor in there, do control+v, and hit the save icon. I call that document Save The Posts, hahaha !!!!!!

P.S. I also save the final version of ANYTHING I write, no matter how short, emails, discussion group posts, blogs, whatever, before I hit the upload or send button. But I am saving every few sentences the longer stuff too where I never know til the end whether it's the final version or not. A long post I might save half a dozen or more versions of before done. It's easy enough to delete my Save The Posts text after the posting is successful. That way that document doesn't get to be 100 pages long !!!!!!!!

Hope this saves some folks a lot of suffering and anguish.

Anyone have any other suggestions? This is SUCH a common problem, and some people have lost 3000 words, imagine the agony of that !!!!!!!!

Blessings, OM Bastet

Re: FAQ/HOW TO prevent losing text before posting

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:04:53 -0000

thanks for reposting this, OM! really appreciate all your help on this forum. feel free to let me know if you have other questions that needs to be addressed. i'll be posting more FAQs and HOWTOs soon.

sincerely,
~C

Green posts?

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:36:05 -0000

How does something on the site become green?

Re: Green posts?

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:16:06 -0000

Hi Tsuya,

darn good question!!! I didn't know the answer myself, especially after looking at that page! but I did a search this group for "Green" and found this 3-post thread from last summer among 13 other posts whose relevance I didn't see but didn't check out:

http://pods.gaia.com/how_tos_and_faqs/discussions/view/155380

I think it's the answer. If it's not complete enough for you, ask again here.

Blessings, OM Bastet

HOW TO Accept a Friend Invitation

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:00:56 -0000

The answer to this might sound ridiculously obvious, but I have discovered a little tricky part .

If you are dealing with the invite in your onsite Gaia mail inbox, no problem. Just be sure to click on Accept Invitation. If you want to ask the person for more info about them or why they chose you, before accepting, then just hit Reply. If you hit Reply, the Accept and Decline invitation options each will stay available the next time you open that mail item in your Gaia community mail inbox.

(Friend invites have a little persons-and -chainlink icon, instead of the regular envelope icon, perhaps you have noticed. When you accept (and also when you reply? not sure) a green arrow shows up in the lower right part of the little icon, kinda hard to see.)

IF HOWEVER you try to deal with the Friend invitation directly from the Notification of it ["You have a new message in your Gaia Inbox"] in your regular email program, TWO potential hitches exist.

First, unless it's obvious from the subject or text, you won't have any way to know whether it is actually a Friend invitation or not !!!!! Many a Friend has slipped through THAT crack !! at least til the folks figured it out. The system does not label it differently from a regular message.

And this can play into the second potential hitch: If you hit Reply link directly from your regular email notification, you are hitting Reply and not Accept Invitation. Then later you'll both be puzzled why you don't show up on each other's Friends list. Your clue will be, if you open your original inbox item, you will see that the Accept Invitation option is STILL AVAILABLE. That means it hasn't been used, just like I just told you it wasn't, haha !!!!

If you hit View link directly from your regular email notification of the message, however, all is cool. You will have opened the message as per usual in your inbox in the Gaia system, and you can see it's a Friend invite, give it any tags you want, and Accept Invitation, or Decline Invitation, or Reply, or whatever.

Hope this little tip prevents a few frustrated moments for some folks.

Blessings, OM Bastet

Re: HOW TO Accept a Friend Invitation

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 06:07:23 -0000

OM,

thanks for detailing this. you are correct and i too would love those hitches to get resolved.

it's on now on our long list of laundry list :)

~C

Re: Green posts?

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 09:07:15 -0000

Thanks, OM. That was perfect.

~C4Chaos said you had to be tagged...

environment earth-day vegan climate-change global-warming electric-cars vegetarian animal-rights hybrids permaculture
...to be green

Is there any way to add 'green' and 'ecology' to that list?

And maybe to add quotes and groups to the green page? I've been looking for an active green group...

Oh, and how becomes a member green? One of those tags in profile interests???

Maybe also 'Organic'? Biodiesel? Solar power - alternative energy - ecovilliage etc?

Re: Green posts?

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 10:18:46 -0000

Your suggestions all sound necessary and your questions do seem to call for answers !!!!

Tsuya, this is an "open letter" to you from other threads I don't have time to hunt up again.

I appreciate your graciousness in acknowledging me for offering a detailed response re not getting posts eaten. From the way you asked the question I had no idea you were so sophisticated about all this computer stuff, so you were gracious about my answering as if you were a Dummy like me !!!!

Also, I cannot tell you how INCREDIBLY THRILLED I am, in orbit, that you are pointing out so many of the problems and glitches in the Books section. I feel passionately about that section, and tried when I first joined to point out some real hindrances to use of the section. Your explorations and postings are SUCH a service to us all, and of course I am thrilled that the section will be revamped. I just hope all the hindrances are dealt with.

Here's one you probably haven't turned up yet, but I did post about it. In one's Bookshelf, dealing with a whole page of books, wanting to add tags to them all, starting at the top. Hitting Add tags on the book, the page flips to the top and you have to scroll down to add the tags. This is OK for the first 3 items, as the flip doesn't hit the item, but at 7 times per page, this got tiresome very quickly..... I think the page flips to the top when the tags are added, too. So have to scroll down to add tags, and then also to get to the next book. Argh !!

THANK YOU for your efforts and suggestions !!!! (here re Green, and elsewhere.)

Blessings, OM Bastet

Re: Green posts?

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:00:03 -0000

thanks for the suggested keywords, Tsuya. will forward this to our Dev team for consideration.

~C

Re: Green posts?

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:56:13 -0000

What-what-what-WHAT happened?? When I looked tonight, most of the content was gone from the green page - only videos and bookmarks appeared. No people, blog posts, etc. Is this still in development??

~~

OM, thanks for all you posted... re: getting posts eaten, it's a common, not often discussed problem, so I was glad to see you lay out the workarounds in detail. Most have learned these the hard way, so some preemptive warning on how to avoid losing stuff is great. I just go bonkers when I see people still blaming themselves. And there are no dummies - everyone is a dummy about something - same statement, you know? I am absolutely unique in all the world - just like everybody else...

And I'm glad you're glad - THRILLED - about all the deets on the book glitches Ive posted. I feel like such a nag sometimes! Oh, and perfectionist - did I mention that one? I, too, love-love-LOVE that feature, but it's always been buggy. I have seen the page bookmark error in the bookshelf - how it always defaults back to the top of the page when you add tags rather than 'remembering' where you were. When I got burned out on this two years ago, that feature wasn't even available - you had to tag them one at a time - so it's really improvement! My workaround for that is a ctrl-c of the title you are tagging, then a ctrl-f (if you are in Firefox, it's on the same page, ie opens a popup window, I believe), ctrl-v to paste the text to the find box to jump back where you were. Or just eyeball the vertical slide bar on the right of the screen - then drag back to the approximate location you left off. Time consuming, but there you have it. Still better than one at a time! You might want to re-post a request for a fix on it if it's something you use a lot - I would think it would be a pretty quick fix, but there's a LOT happening on that page. And just keep posting things as you find them. They might take some time to get seen to, but at least the info's out there. Sometimes I feel like I spend more time posting on bugs than I do on content, and that's a shame, but I do LOVE this feature, and would like to see it become all that it can be - then maybe more folks will use it to share... seems like there are a LOT of readers here, and a lot of fresh ideas are still to be found in book form!

Best,
Tsuya

Re: Green posts?

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:30:34 -0000

I'm not sure what happened, Tsuya. Looks good now, though...

Re: Green posts?

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:00:04 -0000

Hi Tsuya :)

I see no reason not to add these keywords for the release next week - I'll update this space when it happens, or if one does not make it in for some reason. Thx for the suggestions! Do feel free to add more here.

I'm sorry about the search content disappearing . There was a problem with our search server, one that has popped up from time to time and we are looking to prevent!

Re: Green posts?

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:27:07 -0000

Thanks, guys! I see blogs and peeps back today, but when I click on More Blogs, it takes me to an unsorted list of ALL current blogs, not just green ones... may be that same sort error?

Blessings to all, T

Re: Green posts?

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:46:57 -0000

Wow, it's not only "More Blogs" it's "More Books/Bookmarks" etc! Thanks for pointing this out. Will see what we can do over the next week andget back to you then :)