The Baby Is Growing A Community Feeling

Over the past few months, several new features have been added to further enhance evolt.org's strong community. Some features are a direct result of feedback received from the recent evolt.org survey. Also, a new version of the source code has also been compiled and is available from sourceforge.

Author Recognition

Probably the most noticeable changes are the features that have been added to enhance the recognition of evolt.org's authors. On each article page, there is an author-specific block of information which includes:

• the author's full name and user id which links to the author's page;
• a graphic representation of the number of articles published by the author (i.e. the cubes);
• a space for the author's photo if provided (see Upload Your Information for more details);
• date the user registered his/her evolt.org account;
• date the user last logged on to the evolt.org web site;
• total number of approved articles that the author has written;
• the author's average rating received (based on all approved articles written by this author which have been rated);
• total number of ratings received by the author; and,
• links to the author's email address, member page and bio (see next paragraph).

Also on each article page is the author's bio if it has been supplied (see Upload Your Information for more details), and a list of five other articles written by the author. This information appears at the end of the article.

The author's photo and bio (if supplied) will also appear on his/her user page; see my user page for an example.

Upload your Information

All authors are encouraged to submit their information. Log on to the evolt.org main web site, click on "Edit Account" (under Preferences on the side bar).

Upload a photo if you wish. Note that the image must be in "GIF" or "JPG" format, and must be exactly 180 pixels wide by 90 pixels tall. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain adding a thin, black border to your photo! Check out the creative photos that .jeff and aardvark have used. Have fun creating your photo. Be creative. Express your personality. If you need help, ask your friends on thelist for some graphical advice.

Enter a bio for inclusion in your articles. Promote yourself and/or your business. Help build the evolt.org community!

Even if you haven't published any articles on evolt.org yet, you can still enter your bio and photo for display on your user page.

Other Modifications

Other less noticeable changes include:

• several minor bug fixes that have been reported to thesite mailing list;
• revived article on the homepage;
• comment search box on the sidebar;
• on the user's page a link has been added to search the <tips> for that user; and,
• improvements made to both the comments displayed on the web site and also the email notifications that get sent out when new comments have been posted.

Changes to the evolt.org sub-sites

lists.evolt.org

• Work is still in progress to improve the usability of the lists.evolt.org web site. Definitions have been provided for the various mailing lists as well as links to modify subscriptions and view archives.
• Based on feedback from the recent evolt.org survey, the Tips Harvester has two versions available: the new version which provides an archive-like list of the <tips> for each week, and the original digest-like version which contains all <tips> for the week in one file.
• The search functionality for the <tips> has also been greatly improved upon.

directory.evolt.org

• Resources are added on a continuous basis to the directory web site. Let's continue to make this one of the best web-related directories available. One where the links are added by web professionals for web professionals.
• A new bookmarklet has been created that makes it super-easy for one to add resources to the directory.evolt.org web site.

Can I Help?

Sure!

You can work with other web designers and developers on the evolt.org web site, by joining thesite mailing list. Database folks, pixel wranglers, HTML/CSS monkeys, testers, documentation writers, developers - no matter what your skill set or skill level, you can help out!

You can also help shape the future of evolt.org on theforum mailing list. Dedicated to making evolt.org a better place, discussions on this list include how to make thelist more useful to all members, improvements for the web site, how evolt.org should be structured, etc. Both short-term and long-term plans for evolt.org are discussed.