1) The comment tracker in the upper right is my default way to know what is going on. Why? Because I have a lot of people on my friend list so if one of you has commented on an article, the comment tracker tells me; that basically means the community has already done the work telling me what is worth talking about.
2) NEW in big red letters. If an article in your comment tracker has 6 or 7 comments since you last checked, don't worry that clicking on it clears the comment tracker. New comments have a big red NEW on them and, if you click on the word NEW, it takes you to the next new article.
3) Article tracking. If you would like to track an article regardless of whether or not a friend has commented on it and regardless of whether or not it is a reply to one of your comments, click Track Comments below the title.
4) Adding friends. Add them early and often. It just means they are providing you waypoints on good stuff. It's not a huge commitment, this isn't that kind of high-pressure internet relationship. Of course, you can only chat if you are mutual friends. That's to prevent all of us from being harassed by the hordes of internet science groupies we know are lurking out there.
5) Stumbleupon. Yes, it is confusing, but it is pretty terrific because their algorithm will lead people to the kind of stuff they like to read, which means if you put your article in the system, you will be found by people who may not have found you otherwise. They're the only ones who get their own special button because they are that good.
6) Video. Because there are so many video formats and they can be a headache, we don't put it in the editor. When you are done with everything else in your article, click the 'Switch to Plain Editor' box below your text and put an embed code directly into the HTML where you want it. Then click Save without switching back to our text editor, else it will strip out the code. If you have a local file you want to upload go to our Video site and upload it there, then take the embed code and use it here.
7) Scheduling articles. You can use the Publish On tab when creating an article to have your article appear on a certain date. However, you need to make sure you use the same date for Authored On ... else it will publish when you want but have a date when you created it. So it will never appear on the front page if you schedule it to publish a month from now but kept today's date.
8) Related Links. This tells you what other articles should appear as related to this one. It works best if you only use two or three because if you use too many, no articles will match and it will just put up some popular ones instead. 'Breast cancer' or 'earthquake predictions' works fine but these aren't meta tags so more is not better.
9) Profile. You can add badges for causes you like, a blogroll, books, etc. in your profile but not many people do it, which tells me our profile format stinks. We'll work on redoing that.
10) Article ideas. If you want to get literally every news release on the planet (that sends releases to us, anyway, so almost everyone in America but maybe 20% of Europe and 5% of Asia) put http://www.science20.com/news_releases_0/feed in your feed reader. This stuff has nothing to do with us, it is unedited, unfiltered and may contain complete rubbish. But if something press release-ish gets edited and makes it to the front page, it came from there. As you can guess, about 5 out of 50 actually go out to readers, the rest are just there, but something that interests you may be in there somewhere. http://www.science20.com/news_releases_0 is the URL if you're more of a bookmark person.
Let me know if I forgot anything and I can answer it in the comments.
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