State of the Dunk

by Basketball John on May 13, 2008 4:55 PM MDT Comment 0 comments

with another off day for Kobe to get better, I thought I'd make sure everyone is up to speed on the new site. There's a lot of stuff there and I'm just beginning to understand it all. But the guys at SBNation have done a fantastic job at building sites that are not just a website, but a community. So I'd like to go over some cool things about SLC Dunk if you haven't figured it out yet.

FanPosts and FanShots

Besides game threads, these are the biggest part of the community. FanPosts your own person blog on SLC Dunk. A lot of you have your own blogs that are great. But for those who don't, or if you have a story to put on SLC Dunk instead of your own site, consider FanPosts as your way to post a story, your thoughts on the Jazz, a poll question, etc. It can even be a link to your own site with a story. There's a minimum word limit of 75 words, but that's not really a lot.

Now, if you've found a cool video, picture, link, etc but don't want to put up a long post about it, then you want FanShots. They're quick posts about things you find on the web. Now, here's an addicting tool. So make sure to use it a lot. Click on the link below and drag it to your browser's toolbar. Then, when you're reading an article online, viewing a YouTube video, or if you've found a picture, click on the button and it will bring up a new FanPost with the fields already filled in. You just need to modify the fields if you want, and then click publish. It's really easy to get out of hand with it.

FanShotIt! (click and drag this link to your browser) You can also right-click on it and save it to your favorites.

And if there are really good posts, make sure to click on the recommend button at the end of the post. If it gets recommended enough, it will land in the recommended posts section on the right side. And of course if it's something that's not appropriate, feel free to click the flag button and put in a reason.

And if the post if good enough, it can be promoted to the front page.

Your own blog

Like I said. Everyone has a blog at SLC Dunk. The URL is http://www.sbnation.com/users/basketballjohn/blog (replacing basketballjohn with your username). The blog is comprised of your FanShots and FanPosts.

You can also read other user's posts by clicking on their username and then the Blog link.

RSS Feeds

There are RSS feeds for almost everything. There are feeds for the main stories, one for FanPosts, one for FanShots, and more for individual users' blogs. If you're using FireFox, you can click on the RSS icon in the address bar. If you're using IE, then there's a RSS icon on the toolbar that will show up. Click on them to add it. If you're using an feed reader such as Google Reader, Bloglines, etc, then here are the links for the feeds

Main Page: http://feeds.feedburner.com/sportsblogs/slcdunk.xml
Fan Shots: http://www.slcdunk.com/rss/fanposts
Fan Posts: http://www.slcdunk.com/rss/fanshots
Individual Users Activity: http://www.sbnation.com/users/basketballjohn/activity/feed
Individual Users' Blogs: http://www.sbnation.com/users/basketballjohn/blog/feed
Atom Feeds: http://feeds.feedburner.com/sportsblogs/slcdunk.xml

Comments

Comments allow you to user basic HTML for links, images, etc. So don't hold back when posting.

Just with posts, you can recommend and flag comments. They're located under the actions link for each comment.

Searching

Granted, SLC Dunk isn't very old, but the search feature is great. You can search main stories, FanShots, FanPosts, and comments. You you can easily find contradictory statements that I or others have made in the past.