The first thing you’ll notice is that the look of the front page has changed. What was a newspaper-like format now resembles a portal. The image below shows what the new format looks like.
The first thing I want to point your attention to is the area marked with the letter A. This is where your perspectives are located. A perspective encapsulates your preferences and by having several of those you can view the article space from different angles. You may switch between perspectives, edit the current one, create a new one or manage them. More on this functionality later.
Area B is where the change is most obvious. Instead of a newspaper-like format, the page is now organized like a portal. We’ve broken down your top articles into groups based on their content type (blogs, notes, etc.). Each group lists its top articles in order of importance to you. The most important articles will be expanded and include an excerpt below their title. To gain access to the next batch of articles in the group simply click on the More… link in the group’s header section.
The groups are automatically sorted based on the importance of their comprising articles. Remember that you can always rate the content type corresponding to the group and thus affect this order.
Area C includes functionality that is global to DevToday and is not dependant on which perspective you are currently in. This includes the help section.
The next major enhancement we’ve made was to the profile page. The profile page is where you can see you existing ratings and/or create new ones for any given perspective. The following image shows a sample profile page. To access it on your system, click on the [edit] link next to any perspective name in area A.
The new profile page breaks down your ratings by what you rated. One table is shown for your ratings about SDN’s product lines, another for ratings you made about SDN’s content type and the third for all other ratings. The latter shows only when you have such ratings.
Regardless of which box the object you want to rate is, the process is the same. The right-hand-side of each box (area E) displays the current ratings of the objects that are on its left-hand-side. Moving the mouse over a row will cause it to highlight in gray as is shown by the letter F. To rate the object, simply click on any of the icons in area E.
You may also rate objects in the traditional way by hovering the mouse over any of the discussion objects and selecting the rating from the popup window.
Area G allows you to switch between the four perspective editing screens. The General tab is for editing the perspective’s title and format (in case you want to switch back to newspaper format); the Profile tab is the current screen; the Dismissals tab lists all articles you dismissed; and the Newsletter tab lets you subscribe to this perspective by email.
For your convenience a legend is provided at the bottom of the screen.
The last screen I want to talk about is the perspective creation screen. This screen pops up when you click on the [new] link that is found in area A. The next image shows the perspective creation screen.
Creating a perspective is now easier than ever using this screen. Enter a title for your perspective; choose the format of the front page (area D); indicate if you want to subscribe to it by email and voila.
Hint: if you later want to change any of those settings you can do so by entering the edit perspective screen and selecting the General tab that is in area G.
We sincerely hope these enhancements will help you find what you’re looking for even faster. If you have any comments or suggestions, do not hesitate to publish comments to this blog.
Happy 2004!
Brian
PS, if you are not yet familiar with DevToday, read brian.willis/blog or check out DevToday’s help section.
