Below is a description of what all the links do in the left navigation panel below your name.

Post a Xombyte
This is the bread and butter of Xomba.com. This is the place you post everything you have to post. It’s the central nervous system of the site. From here you can do the following:

Select a title - Something compelling that will make people want to read what you have to write.

Category – Choose the one category that best fits the main topic of your post.

Tags – Key words and terms that will help people find your Xombytes outside of the category structure. These help the ‘Similar links’ module do its job and find posts that are similar to yours. So it’s important that these be accurate.

Body – What you have to say goes here.

Click Preview to see what it will look like, check the formatting and maybe do one last spell check.

Click Submit and you’re done! Congratulations you just posted your first Xombyte.

View My Profile

This entire area has it’s own In-Depth Guide and can be found here.

Guestbooks
Clicking this link gives you a listing of all users who have setup the Guestbook feature in their profile. You can quickly see how many entries each has as well as how long ago there was an update. If you want to drop someone a note that is publicly accessible this is where you would go to do that. It’s basically comments from person to person and not in relation to any particular Xombyte.

Clicking on the sub-header My Guestbook will quickly take you to any comments that have been posted in your guestbook.

My Buddylist
Brett is automatically added to your Buddy list because everyone needs at least one friend to start. Buddies are people you have added to your list and Buddy of lists people who have chosen to have you as a buddy. You need not add everyone to your buddy list if you do not wish to do so. If you have a lot of buddies you can create groups to manage them if you need help remembering why people are your buddy.

My Inbox (0)

The number in the parenthesis (brackets if you’re British) is how many new messages you have. If you click this link it will automatically take you to the Inbox where you can see all your new and old messages that you haven’t chosen to delete. Clicking the Sent message link will show you messages you sent to other users.

My Workspace

The workspace is a place where you can check on all the places you have posted. It will tell you the type of post, the title, the owner (which will be you), if it was published for others to see, when it was last modified, if there have been any replies and two possible operations Edit and Delete. Want to see more or less posts per page? Click the configure tab and tell it how many items and files to show on each page. This will paginate the workspace based on your preferences. PG loves this page!

My Xombytes
This is the page that will list all of your Xombytes in an easy to read 10 per page format. It will also show you how they look in the preview from a category listing so that you can decide if you want to show more or less by inserting the break tag (see the Post a Xombyte screen). It will show you quick stats about each Xombyte including reads and comments. Some will prefer this over the Workspace as it shows reads and Workspace does not. But it is not configurable and will only show 10 at a time. You can also send others the location(url) and they can use it to quickly check all of your posts. You can use this to check up on your buddies and see if they have posted anything new.

"http://www.xomba.com/xombyte/[USERNAME]" where [USERNAME] is the name of the writer you want to read. For example http://www.xomba.com/xombyte/PoisedGuru

Recent Popular Content

A look at the most read articles on the site today in an easy to use format. Clicking on the link takes you to today’s hot topics which you can then sort by type, title, author, when it was created or how many reads it has. Here you can also click on the all-time popular content tab and see which posts have been read the most for the entire history of the site as well as the total number of reads on each one.

Tags

What the heck is this thing? It’s Tag-adelic!
This shows you the most popular tags and categories for posting. The bigger the word the more posts it has. Looking for something to read or a tag that’s screaming for attention? You’ve found it right here. Simply click on each one and it will take you to a list of the articles posted in the tag. This is one of the places where you can see the importance of clear and concise tags for all your posts.

The sub-heading Categories lets you see how many articles are in each category in a relative manner. For example if Professional Organizations is tiny and Fiction & Poetry is large and bold then you know that it has many more posts than the other one. This list does not include user-created tags.

The sub-heading newsletter will quickly link you to a place where you can catch up on all the newsletters that Xomba has sent out

The sub-heading Tags shows you only the popular tags, not inter-mixed with the categories. Here you can see how many posts have gone into the most popular user created tags

User List
A list of recently logged in users as well as a few brief notes about them like their ‘motto’ age, location sex and avatar. You can click on any user name to get to their profile.

Weblinks

Future feature, nothing much to say about it right now.

Create Content

So you want to post something for people to see. Well you can do that here by either clicking on image or Xombyte post


Steps for uploading an image from here:
1) click on image.
2) Give the photo a good title and a short description. Click the browse button and navigate to the file you want to upload. Click Submit. DING! ALL DONE.

Clicking the Xombyte post link here will take you to Post a Xombyte which was covered at the beginning of this article.

RSS Feeds
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary (take your pick).

Ever wonder how you could give your friends one place to keep track of all your posts on a specific topic or under a specific tag? Well HERE it is. PG posts everything under a Xomba moderator tag. This page shows you a quick RSS feed that automatically updates every time he, er I… posts something with that tag. If you have a multi-part story and you give them all a unique tag they will show up automatically on these feeds. Yes, it’s that simple. Just share the feed locations with your friends and they can use them in any news feed reader or to make live bookmarks with Firefox.

Category Browser

Looking for something specific? You can do that here. By highlighting the specific tags and the category you can see everything that has been posted in the category with any or all of those tags. Not sure what category to look in then click on the link to the category description page and read more.

Log out
Never use this link! Ok, you can if you really want to quit your session. We won’t mind, as long as you return!