At the top of every page on Tinfinger (apart from the front page) you will see a big search box to the right of our logo, with a button on the right. For pages where there are pre-determined search terms to populate the search box, you'll see a list of links to perform the same search for different types of content. For all other pages - and you can also access this on populated pages by clicking on the advanced search links brown text - there are a bunch of brown links on the line underneath the search box:
Search in ... profiles, news/blogs, opinions or pictures ... for ... humans, category, tag, author, nation or text
These links allow you to change what you're searching for. Tinfinger has databases full of profiles of people, news and blog mentions of those people, opinions about those people submitted by users like you, and also pictures of those people. You can search for any one of these types of content by clicking on the brown links, and the text in the button will change to let you know what you're searching for. Similarly, you can search our content based on the name of the person by selecting humans, or by the category we have assigned them, or a tag associated with them, or the author of some piece of content, or by nationality, or just a plain text search. Mix and match your searches to try out new combinations and see what you can find!
On the front page of Tinfinger right under the logo you will see a list of links to categories, starting with Human and going down on the second line through Art, Business and so on. This system is intended to be an improvement on the old page-based directory navigations on sites like Yahoo and the Open Directory Project. Consider the ODP's Business page - a huge bunch of links and to get anywhere you have to click through multiple new pages. In our system, you don't need to load any new pages until you find the category you want. In our nav bar, the top line is made up of blue links with » signs between them, and the bottom one is all brown links. The important thing to remember is that brown links just navigate through the directory, whereas the blue links load a new page. The » links allow you to go back up levels in the directory. For the techies among you, it's an example of AJAX at work. Hopefully it will become clear once you play around with it for a minute or two.
When you see a person's name linked in a news story, blog entry or search result on the site, you can click through to their profile page. If you are logged in, you will see a Submit link in the profile box under the person's name. Click on that and write your profile of the person into the form. The most important thing to remember with profiles is that you only have nine lines to write in for the first section, which is why the preview function is on that page - the preview is exactly how it will look on the profile page, so make sure you don't write too much text because excess text won't be shown. If you can't tell us the important information about a person in nine lines, you're not trying hard enough! Carriage returns (when you press return for a new line) will be automatically replaced with <br> tags in the first paragraph and body sections. All HTML tags will be stripped from your stories, but you can use the italics tag to indicate an artistic work: <i>italic</i>.
When you see a person's name linked in a news story, blog entry or search result on the site, you can click through to their profile page. If you are logged in, you will see a Submit link in the article section under the portrait box and the picture box. Click on that and write your article on the person into the form. Articles should be categorised into one of the many types in the dropdown menu at the top of the form:
We are concerned with quality here at Tinfinger, especially quality of the articles you submit... because we want to pay you for them! Ratings are a way for us to tell you how good we think your articles and pictures are. To be specific: pictures are rated on focus, lighting, head size (i.e. ideally the person's head would entirely fill the dimensions of the 150x212 image frame) and licensing status (i.e. the more clear it is that the picture is not copyrighted, the higher it rates). Articles are rated on length, accuracy, completeness, language usage and notability of the subject person (i.e. if you submit an article on your unimportant next door neighbour, the article gets 0%!).
