A Leaders Forum Community Group
A Leaders Forum is for Group Founders, Group Administrators, and anyone who is thinking about starting a discussion group on the Daily Strength Website. We discuss how to start a group, how to keep it growing, how to keep daily activity high, and other aspects of managing discussion groups. Would you like to change the world? If so, please come join our group!
When sending out invitations to people to join your group, if you don't know your group's direct link, chances are that many people will simply ignore your invitation. Knowing the link to your group is very important.
Like most folks, I am not a technical wizard. I am self-taught. I learn by mouse-clicking here and mouse-clicking there and hitting this key and punching that key. Up until a few months ago, if someone had asked me what a link was, I would have said that it is a piece of sausage or a loop in a chain.
I found about by accident what a link is. I started my first group, the Laughter Club, and I wanted to send out invitations to people to join the group. Just out of curiosity, I sent an invitation to my own personal email address. I later opened the invite when I checked my email messages. In the invite was a group of green letters that started with http://...
I mouse-clicked on the green letters to find out what would happen. The power grid didn't suddenly go out, and I wasn't instantly surrounded by government agents with automatic weapons, so I figured I hadn't done anything wrong. When I clicked on the green letters link, my group, the Laughter Club, popped up on the computer monitor - hey, pretty nifty!
And that's the story of how Beaumont learned about "links." Next time, we'll have a scarry or a funny story about dancing bears and marshmallow people!
And that's how you can learn your group's link to type into all of your invitations, whether you send the via email or hug messages or by other means.
What it means: http is the abbreviation for "hyper-text transfer protocol" - not that you asked, but just so that if you ever walk past a group of geeks you'll know what they're talking about. : - )
Like most folks, I am not a technical wizard. I am self-taught. I learn by mouse-clicking here and mouse-clicking there and hitting this key and punching that key. Up until a few months ago, if someone had asked me what a link was, I would have said that it is a piece of sausage or a loop in a chain.
I found about by accident what a link is. I started my first group, the Laughter Club, and I wanted to send out invitations to people to join the group. Just out of curiosity, I sent an invitation to my own personal email address. I later opened the invite when I checked my email messages. In the invite was a group of green letters that started with http://...
I mouse-clicked on the green letters to find out what would happen. The power grid didn't suddenly go out, and I wasn't instantly surrounded by government agents with automatic weapons, so I figured I hadn't done anything wrong. When I clicked on the green letters link, my group, the Laughter Club, popped up on the computer monitor - hey, pretty nifty!
And that's the story of how Beaumont learned about "links." Next time, we'll have a scarry or a funny story about dancing bears and marshmallow people!
And that's how you can learn your group's link to type into all of your invitations, whether you send the via email or hug messages or by other means.
What it means: http is the abbreviation for "hyper-text transfer protocol" - not that you asked, but just so that if you ever walk past a group of geeks you'll know what they're talking about. : - )
The invite will arrive in your email inbox at about the speed of light, or at a slightly slower speed depending on the amount of traffic on the internet at the given moment (if your email service is provided by Alice & Joe's All You Can Eat Diner and Internet Cafe, it could possibly take hours or over a day).
Open up the email invite. Click on the green letters link - there might be a couple of green letters links in the message, so try both of them to find out which is the one that takes you directly to your group's page on the Daily Strength Website. Your group's page will pop up on the screen, and near the top of the screen you will see your full link, again, starting with the letters http.
Copy this link onto a sheet of paper to keep near your computer (or to carry with you if you use public library computers as I do). In spite of word processing programs like "Word," that might be on your computer, there's still a lot to be said in favor of the old fashioned paper and pen/pencil method of recording data. You will want to pay careful attention to the :'s and /'s and -'s, being sure not to confuse them with other symbols or characters, such as the ;'s and \'s and _'s.
One other funny thing. Let's say that you send an invite to your pal fuzzyweirdo on the Dailystrength Website, via a hug message. You type in your full link, and then you hit submit or send, and you look at the results. Your link now appears in green letters - but wait, something's amiss - some of the letters at the end of the link are missing - where did they go - did they get lost on the internet, or did you do something wrong, like forget to type them in? Is it gremlins in the computer or Alzheimer's taking over your brain? Neither. For reasons unbeknownst to even Beaumont, the system truncates, or cuts off, a good part of the "visible-on-screen" portion of the link, but even so, the link is good to go. Let's see that in effect.
To illustrate, I'm going to show you one of the hug message invites that I use for the Laughter Club. I find some unsuspecting stranger, often a new member of the Daily Strength Website, and begin typing in their hugbook: To find your happy place, mouse-click on the green letters here: http://dailystrength
And then I pause while trying to recall what the rest of the letters and symbols in the link are, and I then type that in: .org/groups/laughterclub
You'll notice that these two halves of the link for the Laughter Club appear in black type, but when put together, and after I send the hug message, they will appear in green type to the reader, and as is unavoidable, the system truncates the visible-on-screen portion of the link. So putting the two parts together yields the following:
http://dailystrength.org/groups/laughterclub
So now you can learn about your group's link by sending an email invitation to yourself, clicking on the link in the invite, and copying down and saving the link for later use.
Wow, that could have been a lot clearer and and a lot simpler if someone who actually knew what they were talking about had explained it to you! And maybe, if we ask some of the other members of the Leaders Group/Leaders Forum to explain how you can find and use your group's link, they'll give us a better explanation. Pretty please, with chocolate sauce and a cherry on top, will those of you with some knowledge of how links work, please, please, please, teach Beaumont and everyone else here how it all works, in plain English?
; - )
Thanks!
When you use your group's link in invitations that you post in hug messages and group messages, interested persons can click on your link and go directly to your group, where they will hopefully join. Without knowing your link, many people are likely to just ignore your invitations because they either don't know, or don't want to take the time and mental energy, to try to locate your group's page on the Daily Strength Website.
If you happen to be a newbie to all of this (and there's no shame in that; we all have to start somewhere), and you still can't figure out your group's link, then in your invitations tell people that they can find your group listed on your personal page on this website. I did that for quite a while before I finally grasped the concept of "links."
1. Click on the page you want to go to, your profile, a group you are in or any page on the world wide web for that matter.
2. Go to the url at the top of the page (this will start with http://), click on the url, right click on the mouse and select copy.
3. Once you have this in you paste buffer you can paste this into a hug, a message, a discussion post or reply, your journal, whatever by simply right clicking the mouse and selecting paste.
I am always doing this to create youtube links in posts I just do a google search for the song I want, click on the youtube result and cut and paste the url from the browser as I explained earlier.
For many people who have been on DS for a while they are probably experts in doing this. In case you are not you will find this really helpfull.
http://dailystrength.org/groups/laughterclub
becomes
www.dailystrength.org/groups/laughterclub
This will shave a few characters off your link when you give it out in your invites - it may not seem like much, but when you type many, many invitations, saving those few keystrokes will save wear and tear on your typing fingers.
Which brings up a trivial point that only a some person like me would even bother to entertain in their brain: Why aren't keyboards arranged so that we use our thumbs more? Basically, our opposable digits only work the space bar - and considering that our thumbs are more muscular than our other digits, think about how much easier that would make typing...sorry, I got off on a bit of a tangent!