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When we launched Notes we had a vision of unifying the strong Community of people that we have brought together within our Network and give everyone a central place to share their ideas and participate in discussions that might not happen on individual sites. The idea was simple, but we left the system open with a couple of cracks that we have been trying to fill.

RSS Feeds

A couple of weeks ago we snuck in RSS feeds for individual Notes topics, but didn’t want to make an announcement about them until we got feeds out for Notes Communities. Well the time has come where you can either subscribe to an individual Note or all the Notes in a Community.

If you are looking for the feed for an individual note, simply go to its URL and add /feed/ to the end. Community Notes are even easier with a structure like this:

http://9rules.com/design/notes/feed/

Now unless you are masochistic I wouldn’t advise subscribing to all the Community Notes feeds since during certain times of the day these things seem to fly.

User Rankings

A short while ago I teased you with a list of the Top 10 Note Takers and this seemed to spark a bit of a competition to see who could unseat who at certain spots. The listing has changed a bit since that posting with the exception of me dominating the top spot. The newest rankings show the 9rules crew controlling three of the top four spots and it shows that eating your own dog food can be good for you.

Now with this page we can really begin to have fun and do more with 9rules Notes. Expect to see more contests involving Notes and more stats to see how well your Notes are doing versus others.

Profile Pages

Remember that information you had to input when registering? Well it had to serve some purpose and now you can view your own profile page or anybody else’s. You can check out my profile page to view my latest replies and topics started or just to see what I am interested in (big surprise there).

To get back to simplicity the URL for user profiles is simply:

http://9rules.com/user/username

Profile editing (and Notes editing) will be available by next week so if you don’t like some of the stuff on your profile page, don’t worry because you will be able to change it all soon. It’s simple stuff, but it’s a small step towards bigger things in the future to how everyone uses 9rules.

Fancy Isn’t Always Good

Admittedly we got a bit too fancy with how we expected people to use Notes. Instead of a login page you could simply login from a Notes posting form on a Notes page, but unfortunately that was the only way you could login or even find the registration link. Surprisingly we never really thought twice about such an oversight because nobody ever complained about it. But as you know just because people aren’t saying anything it doesn’t mean that nothing is wrong. With all of that said our most important improvement for today is that we now have an official Registration and Login page along with the ability to reset your password in case you forgot it.

We can be a bit silly sometimes and the most creative and intelligent people can overlook the simplest things. Its a miracle that Notes has done as well as they have with the system being a slight pain in the ass, so if you have ever posted a Note we thank you.

So go on and explore and maybe if you aren’t in the Top 50 you will find a way to get there. Coming Soon…a new way to view 9rules Content around the Network.