There are times during the semester that I really have to work hard to get my fellow LC members to get their BITeS posts written. I understand, there is always so much to do. Not that the summer is really any better, but it is often a time to step back from classes for a bit and re-energize. Sure there are research students and workshops and conferences and placement exams and scheduling and advising and, wow, there just really isn't any down time is there? But we do frequently find time to sneak in some vacation. What that means is that it becomes really hard for me to twist arms and get people to write something. That usually means a late July/early August BITeS is something a little more fluffy. But not this time.
In this BITeS I wanted to inform you about subscriptions. This is a relatively new feature to the site, and this is a great time to play with it. What are subscriptions? This is a way for you to get updates on when things on the site change or get updated. And the good news is you get lots of power to make decisions. Ok, so how do you manage your subscriptions? Across the top of the page you should find some menus including "My VIPEr". Go to "My VIPER" and then "My account". That should bring up a page with tabs across the top including subscriptions. Click on the subscriptions tab and that should give you the overview page. You have many options to set different things. Next to overview you have the Pages/Threads, Content types and Categories (Note: You can also click on these words beneath your user name as shown in the picture below). Pages/Threads shows things you are currently subscribed to. You can turn off your subscription to anything here. Under Content types you can select different types of LOs that you want to be updated about when they are changed or new ones are posted. Categories allows you to select the different forums, subdisciplines and topics you want to subscribe to.
Perhaps even more important are the Delivery of notifications and Settings clickables. Delivery of notifications just lets you turn notifications on and off. Settings is where you really want to spend some time. Under settings you have some auto-subscribe features that allow you to subscribe to anything on the site you create. Anything you are subscribed to will result in you getting an e-mail notification about that particular item when it is created, updated or commented on. I would suggest you keep the setting of digest mode and you can set the interval of sending e-mails to a variety of different settings. I currently use the daily setting and I only get an e-mail if something changes. Having this set at “as soon as possible” was a big mistake during the workshop. This is a great way for you to stay informed about the site and I hope you will find it as useful as I have. It is a fairly new feature, so please let us know if you find any bugs or have any suggested improvements.
Wow, this actually turned into what I think is a fairly informative BITeS post. Honestly, that’s not how it started. I was going to talk about seeing Paul McCartney in concert on July 19th. It was an amazing show. I wanted something to tie that into chemistry and that got me thinking of Beatles songs with chemical elements in the title. I didn’t get far coming up one, maybe two, off my favorite album, Abby Road. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer certainly makes the list, Golden Slumbers is a bit of stretch. That sent me to Google where I found the title of this post, Everyday Chemistry. This is apparently a Beatles album brought to our earth from a parallel universe in which the Beatles had never broken up. No, I am not making that up. I liked the title but I had a feeling that I would get banned from being in charge of BITeS posts if I started writing about parallel universes (hmmm, maybe I should have gone with that original idea). Equipped with a title, I now needed a subject. Since you can get updates using subscriptions on a daily basis, I think it works. And there you go, a little peek behind the BITeS curtain.
