Overview of the new www.stirrhs.ca community website.

In summer 2007, the STIRRHS website (www.stirrhs.ca) was redesigned and ported to the Drupal web platform. This enabled a number of new improvements and features; there are various new tools available to STIRRHS members. Here is a quick explanation of some of those features.

Creating an account:

Creating an account on the STIRRHS website is easy (although if you already had an account on the previous STIRRHS website, you don't need to re-create it; it has been transfered automatically for you). To create a new account, simply click on the orange button “STIRRHS Community Access”, then, the “Create New Account” tab. After filling in your information, you'll receive a confirmation email and instructions on logging in.

Logging into the website:

Once you've created an account, you can log in using the same “STIRRHS Community Access” button, with your username and password. Once you've logged in, you'll see a new graphical user menu appear in the right-hand column. This menu is the starting point for all the interactive functions you can access on STIRRHS.

News Monthly Forum, eForum, Journal Club:

There are three (initially) available forums to help promote interaction between mentors and students.

A forum is public meeting place for open discussion of various topics. Online, a forum may also be referred to as a bulletin board or discussion area.

Forums come in all shapes and sizes. The main objective here is to provide an area where users can interact with questions, answers and discussions on a given topic.

By clicking on an icon for any of the forums – for example, the eForums icon – you're brought to the overview page for that forum:

From here, you can easily view a forum topic and its comments by simply clicking on the title of a topic that interests you. Once in a topic, you can also choose to add your own comment or reply. You can reply to the thread in general by simply scrolling down to the reply text field, and entering your comment. You can also reply to another specific comment in the thread, by clicking the “reply” button for that comment. This allows a dynamic, threaded conversation to take place. You can format your comment just as in a word processor, or even add an attachment if you want to reference a document, presentation or other file:

Once you've filled in your comment, and added any attachments necessary, you can publish it by clicking on “Post comment”. You comment is then added to the discussion.

Similarly, you can create a whole new forum topic by clicking on “Post new forum topic” at the top of any forum (if you have permissions to create a topic in that specific forum). The content adding mechanism behaves exactly the same way as the comments. Once you create your new forum topic, it will appear on the forum overview page and others will be able to view and comment on it.

Library:

The library will be constantly evolving and changing as we devise new ways to display and organize library resources (text, presentations, images, audio and video) and make it easy to find and contribute resources.

At the moment, the Library is a copy of the library on the previous STIRRHS website, and contains all of the same documents. You can click a category to expand and and see what documents (if any) it contains, then easily download that document by clicking on “Attachments”.

Member List:

The member list is the nerve center for finding out about your fellow STIRRHS members. It lists all currently registered STIRRHS users by name, university, and other fields that you can sort by clicking on the title headers. You can achieve a great level of granularity within the fields as well. For example, clicking on “University of Toronto” will yield a page listing all currently registered members at the University of Toronto.

Clicking on a users' photo, or first or last name will bring you to their profile page, where you can learn more about them, read their bio, and even contact them.

My Account:

The “My Account” page is self-explanatory: it allows you to view and edit your account settings, such as the bio information you provided at registration, your password and email address, your photo, and other settings, which are all described in detail on the page itself.

Logout:

The logout button allows you to securely logout from the STIRRHS site. You do not need to logout unless you are using a shared or public computer.

RSS Feeds:

The STIRRHS website offers full support for RSS feeds – both across the site itself, and through various categories and content types. For example, there is an RSS feed for “events”, for each forum, etc.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for: Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a method to easily deliver digital content to your desktop. Subscribers to an RSS feed (described below) receive content in the form of a headline and a summary or preview.

What is an RSS feed?

An RSS feed is the information that is received by the subscriber. People subscribe to RSS feeds using an RSS reader (described below). The content in an RSS feed consists of a headline, description and/or a link to an article on a webpage.

What is an article?

Articles are individual pieces of content that are sent to the subscriber through the RSS feed. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you receive the summary, preview or headline which links to the complete article on the original website.

How do I obtain the content through RSS?

RSS content is received and viewed through RSS readers, news aggregators and some internet browsers. These readers search out the content and STIRRHS RSS feeds that you have subscribed to, making it easy for you to quickly scan content contained within each feed.

# Examples: Web-based Reader: My Yahoo!

# News Aggregators: Bloglines.com, Feedreader.com, newsgator

# Browser: Mozilla Firefox