User Guide

The Main Aggregator

The main page (bluejaysaggr.com), or Everything in the main menu, is structured to give you a good sense of the current Toronto Blue Jays news by just scrolling down the first page. We take steps to assure an accurate representation of the current news landscape on the main page by filtering out certin content.

The following are filtered:

· Blogs (some, so many indexed)

· Fantasy (all)

· MiLB (some)

· Radio (all, find these in the sidebar)

· Video (some, they can come in bunches)

As far as blogs go, I wanted to add as many entrenched and active Blue Jays blogs as possible to Blue Jays Aggregator. They provide excellent commentary and research, but with 20+ blogs indexed, they can take over the front page.

No disrespect intended to the sources limited on the front page. Note that ALL category pages are unfiltered.

Drill down on media outlets, sub-categories or specific writers when available.

Unfiltered

To see every single article, blog post, fantasy analysis, video, radio clip etc. indexed at Blue Jays Aggregator, in chronological order, see the Unfiltered list in the Home sub menu or from the drop-down menu of the front page.

Our Categories

The main menu in the left sidebar of the site contains the main groupings of content. You can drill down to the source and often the author.

You can also find categories beneath each entry in the main column. Groupings by source or author (where appropriate).

Our Links

The story links (large and blue) take you directly to the original article/blog post/photo etc. No pageview traps or other messing around.

We go to great lengths to provide the simplest and most commonly used versions of the URLs we add to the index. We try to limit proxy links, weird identifiers or lengthy, ugly, strings attached to the end of URLs unless integral to the link.

Voting Up or Down

Voting helps us recommend great Blue Jays content to our users.

We've tried to make it as easy and unobtrusive as possible to vote. You DO NOT need to be logged in or have an account. Just click the "thumbs-up" button at the bottom right corner of each entry.

Our RSS feeds contain only unique Blue Jays content.

Depending on the source, RSS feeds often contain non-Blue Jays content and/or redundant third-party content publised at multiples sites. Just like our site in general, Blue Jays Aggregator removes the duplicate and non-Jays content.

Some examples of things you won't find in our feeds:

· Non-Blue Jays articles/posts from newspapers, major media outlets or other non-team-specific sites

· Duplicate content (ie. Associated Press articles at four sources all with different headlines)

· Links that make you jump through hoops to get to the original article

Links in our RSS feeds go directly to the original article/post

Our feed links do not bring you back to Blue Jays Aggregator, as often aggregator sites will do.

There are categorical links in the feed item descriptions, pointed at Blue Jays Aggregator, if you would like to come to the site to see other entries from a particular author or source. There is also the clearly marked option to "View this story at Blue Jays Aggregator" (in most feeds) if you would like to see Blue Jays Aggregator meta data or recommend it to other users. Otherwise, every Griff article takes you directly to the Toronto Star, every Drunk Jays Fans post takes you directly to Drunk Jays Fans.

Clean and straightforward.

User Accounts are disabled for now as we're too shiny new.

We would like to get the site a bit more entrenched and develop a user base before opening things up to user accounts, and user-submitted content, but it's definitely part of our plans.

Some functionality for user accounts that we've been considering:

· Login capabilities with your Twitter, Facebook or OpenID account

· Submit stories/links to Blue Jays Aggregator

· Ability to mark as read, unread, or save for later

· Ability to add personalized comments/recommendations

· A fully-functional user profile that displays your recommendations, submissions etc.

· Claim ownership as a site, blog, or author (and display your content on your profile)

We would love to hear what you would like as fas as functionality goes. Contact Us and let us know.