Making Gling Work For You: Part Three

I had a tough decision to make when deciding what to explore for part three of this exploratory journey. There is so much to see, and all of it seems important! Finally, I settled on going for simplicity by starting at the top. There’s a lot of menu clicking and opening today, so you may want to trade your flashlight for a hard hat with a built in light to keep your mouse hand free :)

The features we will explore today are the menu options at the top of your screen:

• Your Name (Mine says Marissa)

• Settings

• Messages

• Logout

Your Name

When you click on your name, it takes you to your profile. Your profile carries your personal information. You can let others know who you are by adding your name, a description in the About section, your location and your website. (It is important to add your city and state as your location so that your map will appear correctly in the locations section of Gling)

From this page you can edit your profile or view your contributions to Gling. Also, by clicking on your tribes or your friend’s pictures, you can go to those pages as well.

Another cool feature in this section is the tab that says “All Profiles”. If you click on this tab you will be shown a list of all the profiles that have been created. The profiles are arranged by the date they were created, with the most recent (today) being first. There are over 100 pages of names to sort through, making new friends easy to find.

Settings

Clicking on setting will take you to a series of tabs that control your (you guessed it) settings! We’ll go through each tab separately.

E-mail Addresses- Your email address is kept on file to send you notifications and such that are important to you. Using this tab you can change or add email addresses whenever you need to.

OpenID Associations- If you have accounts (i.e. Google or MSN) that use OpenID, you can set it to be your Gling ID as well.

Change Password- You will be asked for the current password in order to change it.

Language- You have the choice of nine different languages to read Gling in.

Time Zone- Having your time zone set correctly will give you the best account of when tweets and messages were sent.

Avatar- Upload and change your picture here.

Messages

First off, notice that on the main page there is a number in parenthesis next to the link for messages. This number indicates how many private messages are waiting in your inbox. There is lots more to do in the messages section than just sending and receiving messages from friends. Let’s take a look at each tab!

The first four tabs are your basic messaging functions.

Compose- This is where you can compose a message. You will need to know the users name to type into the Recipient box. (Hint: You can also send messages by clicking on the send message link in another users profile)

Inbox- This is a listing of the messages you’ve been sent.

Sent- This tab tracks and stores the messages you have sent to other users.

Trash- When you delete a message, it goes to trash. The trash is picked up every so often, so don’t use the trash can for storage :)

Note: Inbox, Sent and Trash all keep you very organized by showing you who the messages were to/from, what the subject was, the date it was sent, and what actions you can take (i.e. delete).

Moving on...

Notices- This feature is extremely cool. It is a streaming list of everything your friends are doing on Gling. You can see who is commenting on what, who is posting new recipes and countless other things. Also in the notices tab is the place to set your email preferences. You can decide which of the notices you want to receive in your personal email. (i.e. you can set it to email you when your friends post new recipes)

Invitations- Using this page you can send invites to friends to have them come and join Gling. It also tracks friend invites that have been sent and received on Gling.

Contacts- “Contacts are people you know who may or may not be on the site (yet).” You can upload contacts from your email list and store them here.

The last feature in the list for today is Logout. You use this at the end of your session on Gling to sever the connection to the site. You don’t have to log out every time, in fact, you can set it to keep you logged in for weeks at a time. It is recommended that you log out each time if you are using a shared computer to access Gling (like at the library).

That’s all the exploring we have time for today. Put your new knowledge to good use and send some invites and messages to friends :) Or, you can backtrack a bit to see Part One and Part Two of Making Gling Work For You.