First of all, I’d like to say a big thank you to each of you, you are helping us out immensely by joining this group of initial testers on the new site.

Now that you’re logged into the site, there are a few things you should know that will help you with getting around.

There are only twenty of you in the testing group right now, we are keeping the group small to begin with, because there is still a lot of work going on! You will undoubtedly find things that don’t work the way they should, or that you think could be better – which is where we need your help.

The whole reason you are here early is so you can try out the site, and let us know about any of those things – if you find something that you think should be done differently, or needs fixing, please go to the bottom of any page and click the Contact Support link. This will take you to our contact form, where you can submit a message to our support team. This is the best way for you to submit any suggestions or problems that you find.

So to get started, please post entries, leave notes, make friends, and try out all the features so you can get a good feel for the new site. You will see both myself and the DiaryMistress around, and there may be other team members coming and going as well.

Again, thanks very much for helping us out in this critical phase of development, if there are any questions please let me know ? .

Some things you will want to do first:

1) Check out your diary

To get to the front page of your diary, click on the icon in the upper right of the screen to access the main site menu:

Once there, if you click on “Diary” this will take you to the new front page of your diary, which is visible to anybody who can see your diary. You should see the entries that were there the last time you used the diary.

2) Change your diary from Private to Public or Friends Only

For privacy and security, all diaries on the new site are currently set to Private so they are only visible to the owner. You will want to change yours so that you can interact with the other testing members.

To change the privacy setting on your diary, go to the menu again, but this time select Profile – this will take you to the section where you can change all of your account and diary settings. On that screen, you will see a horizontal menu:

Click on “Diary” there to get to your Diary Settings. On that screen, you will see a selection for Diary Privacy right at the top. There, you can select either “Public” or “Friends” and then click the Save Changes button at the bottom to update your settings.

Once you’ve done that, other people will be able to see your diary.

3) Add an avatar image

You will probably want to put some sort of image as the avatar for your account (the picture that shows up next to your name around the site). To do that, click through to the Profile like you did above, but then click on “Change Profile Photo” on the Settings menu.

On that screen, you can upload an image (and crop it if necessary) that we will use as your avatar.

4) Write an entry

To start a new entry, click the writing icon in the upper right of the screen. This will take you to the entry editing screen, where you can start writing!

Thanks again for helping us out! Let us know here as you find things you want to talk about.