Welcome to the live beta of the new version of cornellcru.com! No, we won’t be like Google and be in beta forever. Just long enough to iron out the kinks and tweak the interface a bit.

You’ll notice a lot of new-things-that-aren’t-really-new right away. The “portal” (the page you get to when you go right to cornellcru.com) has been redesigned to offer more content:

• (1) Latest Blog Post - read a snippet from the latest blog post
• (2) Text Announcement - right below the 3 Picture-announcements is a new “text announcement” that we can use to highlight things we don’t have a.) pictures for yet or b.) enough picture space for
• (3) Search - Google-search all of cornellcru.com, from anywhere in cornellcru.com
• (4) Meta - this has been around for a while, but you a.) had to login to see it and b.) had to make the drop-down drop down. Here you can get access to all of our RSS feeds, look through listserv archives in the Google Group, and find our GCal cal. Check out the RSS Primer for help with feeds.
• (5) Calendar - Same as before, just bigger. That is, more events visible at once.

There are a handful of other new features scattered throughout the site…

• Search on every page
• “Units” now have a default page (well, most of them do), so you’ll avoid the infamous (and rather useless) “boxes” page
• (6) New “Media” section will store Video (Google Video and YouTube embeds) and Pictures (PicasaWeb embeds). If you have either of those that would be appropriate to put up, email me.
• (7) Wiki links and unified login - wiki.cornellcru.com (used by various ministry teams and planning teams) is now linked to on the left, if you’re logged in and have requested it to be added to your account. I’ve added it to many of your accounts - if I forgot you, email me. Also, by logging in to cornellcru.com, you log into the wiki as well. So you don’t have to enter your credentials three times (you still are going to hit the pop-up).

What I need from you:

1. Look through the site and let me know what you think. Feel free to leave a comment here or to email me. Look at the style more than the content (which will change a lot over the next few weeks).
2. Talk to me if there are blatant browser incompatibilities. That is, this is designed for/on Firefox 2 on Windows Vista, and also should work fine with IE7. If you’re using something else and are seeing something weird, email or IM me and I’ll try to fix it.
3. Let me know if you need a wiki link added.
4. Upload pics to PicasaWeb and send me the album link.
5. Register if you aren’t registered yet. Registering gets you wiki links and access to our People Search feature.
6. Update your profile and change your address.

-Ben

RSS Feeds provide an easy way to get new content from a website. Many websites have them - news sites like cnn.com, blogs (like those hosted by Xanga, Livejournal, Wordpress, etc.), and even this site - cornellcru.com.  They’re often represented by this symbol: .

What is RSS?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. It lets you subscribe to a website with a type of program that will let you know when there is new content available on the website. This program is called an RSS Aggregator (or Reader) - it pulls together new content from multiple different sources. You can access the content directly in the reader, so you don’t even have to go to the website.

What programs do I use?

You use an Aggregator program. Some popular programs, by platform:

• Windows - RSSOwl, SharpReader, Internet Explorer 7 (built in), or Firefox (via Livebookmarks)
• Mac - NetNewsWire Lite, NewsFire, or Firefox (via Livebookmarks)
• Web-based - Google Reader or Bloglines

What can I subscribe to?

CornellCru.com provides many RSS feeds for you to subscribe to. Once you have an Aggregator set up, click one of the links below to subscribe to the appropriate feed, or copy the link’s location and paste into the Aggregator.

• Cru Blog
• Cru Listserv
• Announcements
• Recent Changes