Welcome to myTPM!
You're looking at TPM's brand new set of community tools, myTPM. Welcome!
By creating a TPM account, you can:
1. Blog: Post your thoughts, your reporting or anything else you'd like to share.
2. Discuss: Post comments responding to staff or reader blog posts and discuss.
3. Recommend: Choose your favorite staff or reader blog posts and recommend them so more people see them.
4. Follow and be followed: Choose your favorite community members to follow so that you can see what they're saying and what articles they're recommending. Gain a following for yourself so that more people see what you have to say and recommend your posts.
Watch the video explanation:
If you're ready to jump in and you're new to TPM, just hit "CREATE AN ACCOUNT" on the toolbar above. If you already have an account, sign in and start using the new system. If you want to learn more about how it all works, read on!
The new myTPM makes it easier than ever to keep your own blog here at TalkingPointsMemo. You'll have a permanent web address, an RSS feed, and your own sidebar with whatever information you'd like to provide.
Once you've logged in, just hit "BLOG NOW" on the toolbar to get a blog and get started. Once you have a blog, you can hit "YOUR BLOG" to see your blog posts, your comments, and your recommendations.
To write an blog entry, "BLOG NOW" on your toolbar and make sure you're on the "Create Entry" page. Enter a title and your post. Choose a one of the other TPM sites under "Category" so that if your post is popular it will show up on the sidebar of that site. If you want, click "Extended" above your text box to add text that will only show on the unique post page. Check the "Publish Date" to make sure it's right, change the "Status" to "Published" and hit save!
If you want to fix old entries, or instead of saving as published save your posts as a draft that you can come back to to publish later, just click on "Manage" and "Entries" from the blogging interface.
You can also edit the photo and information that shows up in the right sidebar of your blog. To do that, just hit "EDIT PROFILE" on the toolbar.
The discussion section after each article is a lively place at every TPM site. Whether debating the blog posts author or other readers about the topic of the post, signing up for a TPM account gives you the ability to contribute to those discussions.
Discussions are threaded, meaning commenters who are directly responding to each other can hit the "respond" button below each other's comment and have theirs indented directly underneath it. This allows readers to keep track of a conversation and alerts the original commenter that they've been responded to so that the conversation can continue.
TPM also has a simple but important commenting policy that every reader should read before they begin. Community members who violate it could have their comments deleted or their privileges revoked.
Recommend Blog Posts
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Recommending is the lifesource of reader posts. When a reader puts up a post, it appears on the "Recent Reader Posts" listing on the sidebar of TPMCafe and on the Cafe Talk blog that includes all reader posts. However, if enough other readers recommend it, it can appear on one of four lists of the "Most Recommended" of the last 24 hours. There is a "Most Recommended" list on each of the news sites for reader posts tagged with that site (Election Central, Muckraker, and TPMtv) and a master list that includes all of them and those not tagged at all on TPMCafe. Recommending, therefore, helps the best content rise to the top and find an bigger audience.
Recommending posts can also help draw the attention of other readers to TPM staff posts that are particularly good and shouldn't be missed. Just like blog posts and comments, recommendations show up on your blog and those who follow you are alerted to your recommendation.
Follow and Be Followed
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Each community member can now choose to follow other community members and receive alerts on their Community Dashboard when that person puts up a blog post, contributes a comment to a discussion, recommends a blog post, or starts to follow someone. They do this simply by hitting the "FOLLOW ME" button on the sidebar of their blog (clicking again removes them from your list).
We hope that it will reward our most thoughtful and interesting community members by allowing them to build an instant audience for their work and a base of recommenders for their posts. We also hope that it will allow groups of people interested in similar topics to find and follow each other.
The sidebar of each person's Community Dashboard will also include a list of the most followed members of the community.
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Resetting your E-Mail and/or Password
You can reset your e-mail address or password through the preferences menu in the myTPM administrative interface. If, for some reason, you can't reset your password, email us at help@talkingpointsmemo.com, and we'll reset it for you.
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Dashboard icons are by Brand Spanking New and are used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.
