coRank "Admin Tour"
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coRank is a service that allows you to create your own "social news" or
bookmarking/favorites site.
In other words, in coRank you can create and join sites where people submit stories or web pages they've found interesting, and where they can aso read and vote those stories or websites submitted by other people. This tour focuses on showing you what are the things you can do and customize when building a site here, so you can see the most important features and options you have when it comes to create, manage and customize your own social news site.
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| Not only it is free... |
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Let's start with one of the most sought after features.
Not only you can create your own coRank site for free, but you can also
insert advertising and in fact monetize the site. Below is a screenshot
of the admin page that allows you to insert and customize your ad codes.
As you can see up here, you can customize the look and feel of the ads, colors, etc. At this point we only accept adSense ads, so you will need to have a Google adSense account first. However, as you will soon see, this isn't the only way you can insert ads (adSense or otherwise) in your coRank site. |
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| General Info |
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Of course your site will have a name and a brief description, you'll be able to
specify a blog URL if you decide to create a blog for your site, etc.
Also, with just one clic, you'll be able to change the language of your site (English and Spanish only so far). Chances are this isn't something you may need to do often, if at all, but it's our way to let you know that we offer more than one language, and that more are yet to come. Of course, this does not limit the language of the site's content. The pages may be in English but if most of your users are from Japan, you're all welcome to use Japanese, or any other language. |
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| Default themes |
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When you create your site (or anytime once it's been created) you can
choose from six different themes (and more coming soon).
But that's not all. Keep reading... |
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| Customize your site however you like |
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By using a simple and reduced set of templates and styles,
if you're familiar with HTML and CSS, you'll be able to really give your
coRank site the look you want it to have.
Also, as we mentioned earlier regarding placing ads, since you can edit the headers, footers, etc. whether you use adSense or not, you could insert here whatever content you like, including ads. And if that is not enough... |
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| Your own file area |
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In addition to the existing files and templates, you have a file
area where you can add new text files (html, js, etc) or upload
images to help you in the design of your site.
After all, this will be your site. Change, add, or remove whatever you need. It's really easy.
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| Use your own jargon |
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Besides being able to edit existing or new templates, etc. there are
certain terms that are used quite often throughout the site. And yes,
you can change those terms to whatever you like with just the click of a mouse.
For example, coRank uses the term "source" when referring to a person whose opinion you value, but perhaps you'd rather use the word friend, pal, amigo, contact, etc.
Other terms you can change this way are those used to indicate whether you liked a story or not. coRank uses "Interesting" and "Not for me", but hey, if you'd rather use cool/crap, up/down, yeah/nay or whatever, doing it couldn't be easier: type them in, click "Save", and you're done.
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| Your own categories, of course |
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Each coRank site often is about specific topics for which even more specific categories
are needed.
Yup, as you can assume by now, coRank allows you to define up to 24 different categories - whatever you like.
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| Public? Private? |
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Although most coRank sites are public and open to whomever wants to
visit or submit new stories, some people may want to create a site
where only a specific group of people should have acces to the site.
Or if this is your personal bookmarking site, perhaps you'd like anyone being able to visit it and vote on the submitted stories, but only you being able to submit them, etc.
coRank to the rescue! You can set the pricacy/access of your site by modifying three simple settings. |
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| Each site is different |
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We're not done reviewing the customization possibilities of your coRank site.
Do you want allowing people to upload an image to the stories they submit?
Whether the answer to any of those questions is yes or no, you'll be able to configure coRank to behave one way or another, so that it does what you really want it to do (more advanced options coming soon as we see the need for them).
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| Keeping the trash out |
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When you manage a site that allows others to submit "stuff", that stuff
could be anything, and sometimes not very pleasant.
That's why coRank offers you two very important filters:
One to keep people from submitting stories coming from whatever sites you simply don't want to see in your site, and the other filter to do the same thing but this time to keep certain specific users out. You know, just in case some people start to spam or become very very annoying.
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| Stories management |
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This is a must also, of course. The ability for you to edit (or delete) the
stories people (or yourself) submit to your site.
And same thing for users' comments. Usually you hope not ever having to do these things, but if you end up having to do it, it's as easy as it gets. What you cannot do is to edit the number of votes, sorry :-)
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| User Management |
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How many registered users are at your site?
What are their stats? Althoug most of this information is usually
available to other users of your coRank site, as the site administrator you'll
have acces to even more data.
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| User Moderation |
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We're almost done!
If you configure your coRank site so that it can only be used by people you previously approve, obviously you'll be able to review all site registration requests, why they're asking access and of course, you'll be able to either accept, reject or simply ignore their requests. We don't encourage ignoring them, but well, it's your site after all. We just pay the bills to keep things humming.
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| And a lot more... |
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Ok, we've already taken too much of your time.
In this tour we've highlighted the most importan admin tools coRank offers to those who decide to create their "social news" site here with us. Needless to say, this is only the beginning, and there is still a lot to do. As for your users, your coRank site will offer them plenty of things to do in plenty of ways, so that your site really empowers them and give them the chance to get the most out of it. And if you're still wondering why would you want to create a social news site, in the next (and last) slide we tell you a bit about that...
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| Why? |
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Why should I create a social news site in coRank?
Under the What can you build box in the coRank home page we give you some ideas, and to avoid repeating what's there, we won't list them here again. And we're not going to "sell" you the fact that social news sites have proven to be a very strong community building tool, a very useful service, that they're definitely here to stay, we believe that with coRank we've got conceptually where others haven't been yet, and... Ok ok! I'll stop! What we're going to tell you is why you may want to use coRank instead of building your own site either by developing it from scratch or by using some other installable software. By using coRank you don't need to crunch code, get and pay a hosting service, read manuals, install software, access a database, edit the source code, etc. and at the end, still pray that everything works as it should. With coRank, in just 1 minute, your site can be up and running. Done. Nothing to install. Nothing to pay. And if you'd like to customize it, instead of start edting PHP code, you do it all by using the admin pages we've described in this tour.
So, are you ready?
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