Introduction to PostRank Discovery

Getting Around

At the top right corner of the site are your navigation options. You can access your Subscriptions and Topics, get some Help, Login/Logout, and Search for specific feeds, topics, or users.

Creating a Profile

People who have an account on PostRank.com already don’t need to sign up before logging in and exploring PostRank Discovery.

Just log in using your email address and password or OpenID (depending on which you’ve used in the past).

New users who don’t have an account yet will have to sign up. It’s quick and easy.

The first page you will be taken to after logging in is the Profile page under Settings. The only required field is Nickname, but you can add as much or as little additional information as you like to help the community get to know you. You can also complete your profile at a later time.

Once you have completed at least the Nickname field, click Update Profile to save your settings.

Community Activity

After you have saved your profile, you will automatically be taken to the Home page, which displays the Community Activity Stream.

The Community Activity Stream shows you the latest public activity by everyone who is using PostRank Discovery — profile updates, new feeds added, topics created, etc. It’s a great way to take the pulse of the community and take advantage of serendipitous discovery!

Additionally, you will be prompted as to whether you have a reading list you’d like to import now. If so, just say yes and you’ll be taken to the Import page.

Once you start following other community members, you will also have a My Network Activity Stream, which will show you the latest public activity by everyone you follow. Initially your My Network Activity Stream will only display your own recent activity on the site.

Following

Developing your network and sharing with others is the most important part of PostRank Discovery. There are several ways to find people to follow.

Use the search field to look for someone who know or who you think has a profile already.

Select people from the Community Activity stream, click through to their profiles, and follow them there.

See who others in your network are follow, click through to their profiles, and follow them.

When you use your invitations, anyone you invite who registers and creates a profile automatically follows you, and you follow that person.

Following another community member does not mean you’re automatically subscribed to all of their topics, however, just that you’re kept up to date on their activities on the site.

Subscriptions

To subscribe to another community member’s topic list, navigate to the person’s Topics page, and view either their most engaging topics, or the full list of their topics.

Click on any topic that interests you, and select your preferred subscription method from the drop-down on the right.

Topics

A topic is automatically created when you tag a feed with a relevant descriptive keyword. You can tag feeds and create topic reading lists either when you import them into the PostRank system, or after.

To add new feeds to the system, click the Subscriptions link at the top right of the page, then click the Import link on the Subscriptions page.

You can import feeds using OPML, or direct input of URLs. If all the feeds in your OPML import or direct input URLs are on the same topic, you can bulk tag them with the same tag, and voila — instant topic creation. A topic list can contain as many or as few feeds as you like.

To view all the topics you’ve added to the PostRank system, you can access your Topics page via the link at the top right of the page. The Topics page displays either the Topic lists you have created (Mine) or others’ Topic lists that you’re following (Following), depending on which option you select.

Imported feeds are set as public by default, which means that any user logged in to the PostRank site can view them. If you would like any feeds to only be viewable by you when you’re logged in, you can set them to private when you import them by clicking the Private checkbox on the Import page.

You can also toggle whether feeds you’ve already imported are public or private by clicking the lock icon to the right of each feed on your Subscriptions page.

If you have any additional questions about getting started with PostRank Discovery, please let us know via email, Twitter, or Get Satisfaction.