Want to see everything that's happened recently here on amazing.com?

Click the Communities button and you'll see a sub-menu under it. The rightmost option is "Recent Discussions"

Click it and you can see everything that's been going on here recently.

If you'd like it to be on your main communities screen, click "pick boxes" under communities, and drag the "Recent Discussions" box from the lower right of the "Boxes for your Community" section to the appropriate spot under "Your Community".

(Note that you can do the same thing for your profile, too - it's very flexible.)

Hope you enjoy!

D

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Note: You will be prompted to set up an account once done with your message

Note: You will be prompted to set up an account once done with your message

The problem: You find a beautiful layout or background image, and you find that the left and right sides of your page are black, since the background does not fill your entire screen.

This happens with layouts that are designed as coherent artworks, as opposed to those that are designed as repeating tiles. One solution is simply to find a "repeating tile" layout that you like.

How can you tell the difference? An artwork is a large picture, and a repeating tile is a pattern that repeats continuously. If you check out my profile, it's an artwork. You can make an artwork work on even a wide screen by selecting a background color and having the image fade into the background color. Unfortunately, most people who make these layouts don't realize this is needed.

The designers at Free Web Layouts recognize this problem but use an artwork layout that works for every screen size. You will note that all of them wind up ending in a specific background color. So if you have a wide screen, the photos blend into a fixed color on the right. If you are making your own layouts, you should check out this trick and use it yourself, because it's the easiest way to make this kind of layout work.

Another way to work is to make sure your background image is larger than any screen size. Most people, even those with large screens, wind up sizing their windows to no more than 1280 pixels wide. So find a 1280 or more pixel wide image and you should have few problems. But remember that most people will only be seeing the first 1024 or so pixels of it, so keep your most important information on the left, like the FreeWebLayouts people do.

If you want to be friendly to very narrow screens, make sure you cover everything in the first 700 pixels.

I hope this has helped people understand the challenge of designing background image layouts better. The most flexible layouts use a small background image and repeat (or tile) it to the right and down. But the most visually striking layouts are the ones that are coherent artworks. So it is a tradeoff that has a lot to do with the screen size of your viewers and your own priorities.

Hope that helps.

D

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You can use Youtube, or any other video site, to add video to your profile or messages.

All you have to do is to upload the video to Youtube, and "embed" it in our site.

The automatically generated embed code from YouTube will work; just copy and paste it to where you want to see your new video!

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I've noticed that a lot of people write in their profiles things like "I'll finish this later" or even "fdsjklafdlskfd".

It seems very tough to get people here to type something about themselves.

Would it be easier if there were series of questions that you have to answer?

Any suggestions as to what those questions should be?

Any other suggestions on how to make it easier for people to get to know each other here?

Thanks!

D

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Keeping amazing.com secure is your responsibility ... and ours. The problem is with the level of freedom we give you.

We give you freedom because our whole mission is to foster your creativity - to help you produce new things that add richness to your life. If we totally lock you down, that's not possible.

But giving you total freedom is, alas, impossible. There are too many people out there with time to waste. Take this nice fellow. In person, I'm sure I'd like him. He's funny, he's entertaining and what he did only took myspace down and helped restrict the freedom of other people to do what they wanted.

And yet he was more or less benign relative to what many others have done. Other people have put links in their profiles to spyware, programs that download to your computer, spy on your activities, steal your passwords and present you with annoying pop-up ads.

So if you want to know why we prohibit JavaScript in profiles, his antics and those of others are the reason. But unless we prohibited links in profiles, we can't protect you from people who want to direct you to bad sites, to help their own evil schemes.

So be careful and don't click on links that look suspicious. Those "free" smiley face icons come at a price: Intrusive software that can seriously damage your experiences here and on the Internet in general.

One thing you can do to help yourself and help us is to use a web browser other than Internet Explorer for Windows. IE has many features that make it particularly susceptable to attack. If you are a Windows user, we recommend
.

D

PS If you're a Mac user using Safari or Omniweb, I like both of those better than FireFox. But for Windows, it's the best option out there.

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This is just a placeholder message. Feel free to reply to it with a question.

Note: You will be prompted to set up an account once done with your message

Everyone here has different needs, and it's our job here at amazing.com to help them. For instance, you might be a frequent poster on the online communities, while other people just look at the people search and browse users. Profile boxes let you rearrange amazing.com's pages to suit your own life and needs.

For example, let's say you have a nice set of online communities going that you are checking out frequently. Since that's what's most important, you want to see a list of new messages in your communities on top of the screen.

You can go to your home page (home in the orange menu bar on top of the screen) and click on Boxes. Then you can drag the "Examine all communities" box from the bottom of your second column to the top.

Hit save and presto! You will see examine all communities on top. Want your replies to be there instead? Drag it there.

On the right side of the screen, you will see a set of boxes you can drag over to your present set and "plug in". When you hit save, you will see the box on your main page!

Okay, now that you have the box, you might want to change how it's set up. For instance, you might want to change the number of messages displayed or the amount of text to show in each message. To do this just click on the "[Edit]" link at the bottom of the box.

You can use the exact same system to customize your profile. For instance, if you've created a lot of photo posts, you might want to put grab a photo album and position it on your profile page. Then you can tell it how many photos you want to have appear, and it will show that number of your most recent pictures.

The same procedure works as well with the Community page and your online communities.

As you can tell, this gives you enormous flexibility in what you can do with amazing.com. I hope you will enjoy exploring, and please - play around with the features and enjoy them.

And of course if you have questions or ideas, let me know in a reply to this message or an email.

Enjoy!

D

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It's easy to add colors from other sites like freeweblayouts.net or killerkiwi.net . The people who run these sites have spent a lot of time and effort producing interesting color combinations and backgrounds that you can use automatically here.

Right now we are still working on our own native color system, which will eventually allow you to pick your own colors or take the layouts as a base and then change them to fit your desires.

For now, click on "profile" above and then "layouts" to pick your own layout.

Have fun, and as always let me know what you think of the procedure!

D

PS Note that layout codes will not work when pasted into the profile or into HTML blocks. The system takes the codes and modifies them automatically to fit our more advanced system.

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