Just a reminder to everyone -- There is only one week left for you to get your entries in for the PC World Community T-Shirt Design Contest!
You have until 11:59 PM Pacific on Monday, August 4th to email me your design submissions for the shirt. So far, I have only received one design. We need more!
You asked for it, and we made it happen! PC World is having a contest to find the best design for the PC World Community T-Shirt!
Here are the official rules -- please read them very carefully before starting on and submitting your designs.
This is how it will work:
The contest is open to all registered users of PCWorld.com (you must be registered at the time of entry) who are legal residents of the US (excluding Puerto Rico) and Canada (excluding Quebec) and at least 13 years old at the time of entry. You are not eligible if you or someone in your immediate family works for PC World or any manufacturer or supplier of the prize, or any component thereof (read the official rules for further details). I apologize to those who live in other areas -- it is simply too difficult to administer a contest worldwide that complies with all of the various rules & regulations of each country, state, province, etc. It is not that we don't like you, don't want you to be in our community, or don't value your contributions. It is simply a legal and administrative reason.
The contest period has already begun, and ends at 11:59 PM Pacific on August 4th. You must send your original design to me at kellie_parker@pcworld.com prior to the deadline. I will be watching my spam filter, but I would also suggest that you send me a PM to let me know that your entry has been sent. I will send a confirmation of receipt via email for each entry. Please be sure you qualify for the contest (see above) and your entry matches our guidelines (described below; see official rules for further details).
Each person may submit only one entry. We will be using Cafe Press to distribute the shirts, and therefore our design guidelines are based on their recommendations. If you have questions about making shirts for Cafe Press, I suggest that you contact their site for templates, instructions, and support. PC World will not provide design advice or support beyond what is included in the official rules. The design should fit within a maximum area of 10" x 10". The design must be a JPG (up to 7 MB, with the lowest possible compression setting) or a PNG file (up to 4 MB). The design must use RGB color mode; and the submitted file of the Design must have minimum resolution of 300 DPI. Entries must be in English. Each Entrant who submits an Entry in the Contest must be the creator of the Entry, and each Entry must be the Entrant's own original work and must not have been published elsewhere at any time. All submitted Entries become the property of PC World and will not be returned.
We will initially review the designs for compliance with the rules. After the entry deadline has passed, we will post all submissions that meet the rules to a discussion thread, and create a poll for you to vote for your favorite. The voting period will last from the time the entries are posted until 11:59 PM on August 17th. We will then review the designs, the votes, and select the winner. The winner may not be the entry that received the most votes, but the votes will weigh in our decision of the winner.
The winner will receive a $50.00 Visa gift card, and a free shirt with their winning design.
Today, we launched a major re-vamp of PCWorld.com. Most of the changes are internal, behind-the-scenes stuff that you won't notice and probably don't care about. But there are some changes that you will notice --
1) Some of the site navigation is changed, including moving "hardware reviews" and "software reviews" into one "reviews" page, and adding Blogs back to the top header of the site
2) The downloads section has an entirely new look, designed to match the redesign of the Shop & Compare section that we did a few months ago.
3) We changed how content is pulled and displayed on each of the index pages (the pages that are linked on the top and side navigation from the home page).
We welcome comments/suggestions/criticism but are most interested in bug reports. If anyone sees anything out of place, that doesn't function, etc, please post a reply here or start a thread in the Web Site section.
As some of you old-timers (heh) may remember, originally I was approving every document that was submitted. I basically just reviewed it for standards violations (of which there were few) and to weed out documents that weren't really how-to tips, but were questions.
I received some negative feedback about this model, and so for the past few months, everyone has been able to submit documents without approvals. This has resulted in some extra work for the moderators, and the munging up of our documents section with things that are better suited to discussions.
So, we've decided to re-enact the approval policy, but with a twist. user:username=mphenterprises} will now be responsible for approving documents. He is also only looking for standards violations and to weed out non-documents.
I encourage all of you to share your how-to tips & tricks in documents. They are meant to be the knowledge base of the PC World community, and as many have noticed, are also starting to appear in PC World's print magazine. Your contributions and knowledge are incredibly valuable to us, and everyone who reads PC World.
We've created our own branded content widget that you can put on your pages! Add it to your iGoogle, your OS X dashboard, your Facebook page, your MySpace page, your LiveJournal, Blogger and more! Our widget is automatically compatible with many of the popular blog and social networking sites, or you can cut and paste the code directly on to your pages, if you'd like.
Didn't win a shirt in our recent "Save DOS" contest? Now you can order one yourself! Just go to http://www.cafepress.com/savedos to place your order. Shirts are $18.99 and come in sizes S - 3x (2x & 3x are $21.99).
Do you Twitter? If so, you can now follow PC World on Twitter for the latest headlines and how-to content. We are http://www.twitter.com/pc_world (make sure you get that underscore between pc and world!).
As you may have noticed, the PC World forums were down for a little while today, as we upgraded to a new version of our software. We are squashing a few bugs, and please leave a comment here if you discover any more.
Here's some new stuff you can do in the upgrade:
1) Embed YouTube videos. All you have to do is type { youtube } (with no spaces) before and after the YouTube id. (it is case sensitive, btw -- make sure that youtube is in all lowercase.) For example, if I wanted to share this video that is currently making its way around our office (http://youtube.com/watch?v=FrYRY6kx550) I would just put FrYRY6kx550 between the code above (again, all with no spaces).
Voila!
2) Embedding Content Similar to the new YouTube embed, you can now embed the content of one document into another. The code to do this is
{ embedcontent:id=documentid } with no spaces . Here's an example:
How to Turn Off Forum Email Notifications
Tired of getting emails with comments from forum threads you've posted to? Here's how to turn them off.
Step 1: Sign in to PCWorld.com
Step 2: Click "Community" or go directly to http://forums.pcworld.com
Step 3: Go to "Your Stuff" and into "Preferences". Set all Email Notifications to "No".
Step 4: Go to "Your Stuff" and to "Email Notifications". Click the box to the right of all notifications you have already set, and then press "Remove Selected Notifications". Do this until all are cleared.
Once you have done this, you will get no more notifications of updates to message board threads.
You can get the ID for a document by navigating to the document, then noting the last number in the URL. This will usually look like DOC-<document_id>.
3) Set Your Default Tab In the old system, when you clicked on a forum, you were automatically sent to the Overview tab, which may or may not be what you wanted. Now, you can set a default tab in each forum (so it can be different by forum) and it will automatically open to that tab for you when you click on it. I do encourage you not to set the Discussions tab as your default in most forums, as I really want everyone to use and read content from blogs and documents -- I would suggest the Overview tab or the All Content tab. But it's up to you.
4) The new Overview Tab In the old system, the Overview tab was what it was -- and lots of us thought it wasn't that great. I can now customize that tab on a per forum basis to put more stuff there for you. I'm going to be working on these over the next few days. They are really easy for me to change, so if you think another arrangement might be better, please let me know.
Those are the major things.... and of course, there are more admin goodies for me under the hood.
Again, please let us know what you think and if you see any bugs. Thanks!
No, you're not seeing things. Some of you may have already noticed our new layout, which went live a few minutes ago. The community list is moved up to the top, and the top users, tag cloud, and polls are moved over to the left This produces a new three column layout instead of the old 2 column version.
All of the same stuff is still there, we just re-arranged a bit. We hope that this will make it easier for newer members to find their way around and get to the places they want to go to faster.
Let us know what you think, and any other layout changes that you think might make it easier for everyone to use the space.
A few updates that I wanted to make you all aware of regarding the forums...
1) Thanks for letting me know that the black graphic across the top (the tool bar) was not showing up for you. This should be fixed now.
2) I'm working with the design team on some re-categorization of the forums. You'll notice the community list will be arranged more like it was previously -- with Operating Systems as a big category, and Windows, Mac and Linux underneath it. This is a work in progress, so if you see anything that looks a little funky, please know that this is why.
3) We'll be working to make a few other interface changes over the next few weeks. We welcome your ideas on how to make the forums more visually interesting and intuitive for all users -- beginners and experts. Please post your ideas in the comments.
You may have noticed some new colors on PCWorld.com and our forums. We are trying an experiment by changing all of our links from red to blue. It's just something that we're trying out, and we're looking for your feedback on it. Please tell us if you like it more or less, if you noticed or didn't notice the change, etc.
We also added a darker grey background to the sides of the page. We hope that these changes make the page easier for you to read.
This also gives us the flexibility to use the red color for very hot stories, if we want to.
Click around the community and website, and let us know what you think in the comments below.
Those of you who have not filtered out content from the News Discussions forum in your What's New list have likely noticed an influx of News Discussion comment threads. When we shut down our forum system on Friday, the tool that automatically creates comment threads for news stories was shut down as well. This was just re-enabled today, and we did a batch update to create threads for all the news stories posted to the site since Friday. That's why you saw a whole chunk of them show up in the "What's New" list.
This is a temporary situation, and as people post content in other places, all that stuff will filter down and the home page will get back to normal again.
As you may have noticed, the PC World forums were out for most of the afternoon and evening. We had a small hack to our forums, and we needed to take them down in order to fix it. Our technical team has been working on this all afternoon, and everything is all fixed and patched up.
As a result of the fix, you will be forced to log out of the site and log back in. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but it is necessary to ensure the safety of the forums.
