Rough guide to the site features. Also see the site map.

Making the most out of climatex.org

This site is designed to be as interactive as possible, and to show Oxfordshire is engaging with climate change: what you're thinking and doing, your views, experiences and opinions.

This is a rough guide for making the most out of the site. If you've got ideas to help develop it, or a section isn't clear, please contact us. If you're having difficulties writing your blog, contributing to the forums or logging in, please contact us so that we can fix the problem.

Site organisation

We've got three sections so far:

About ClimateXchange...

...containing info about the Climate explorers,  ClimateXchange, the ClimateXchange partners. 

Info, tools and resources...

...the place to go to find out about lightbulb libraries, games and more in the toolkit, check out the climate science info, browse through the links section for our favourite offsite links - and recommend your own .

What's happening in Oxon...

...where you can get inspired by low carbon communities, find Oxon climate change organisations and businesses, discover the faces behind projects and research, check the upcoming events...and more.

 

Climatex.org features

To get involved in the blogs and forums, to upload photos and to post comments, you'll need to create an account. Here's how you do it:

Create an account

Click on 'Log in' in the centre of the home page, or the top right corner of all other pages. Fill in the 'new users' section with your email address, and you'll be sent an email to the address supplied. Follow the instructions in the email. Your ‘username' is the name that will appear on the screen, and you will need to enter this (and make sure you remember it! If you forget, you can request your password to be resent). Entering your real first and last names is optional. Your username should not contain any spaces, and can be up to 30 characters - letters, digits, and underscores only.  

Posting a comment

All the articles pages have a space for you to comment at the botton. Simply write your comment in the box, click the 'post comment' button to post your comment, and it hsould appear on the site.

Logging In 

If you've already got an account, enter your username and password when prompted to do so after clicking the ‘log in' button.

Once you've logged in, you will notice that it says 'logged in as....' in the centre of the home page, and the top right corner of all the other pages. If you click on your username, it will take you to your 'user profile', where you can 'post to your blog'.

Blogging

Blogs are a form of online diaries - where you can put your opinions, comments, links to your favourite sites, rants about the news..anything - but please don't be offensive. Check out the variety of blogs already on the site for ideas. If you're already writing a climate blog elsewhere, let us know and we can link to you from the blog page.

If you'd like to have bits in bold and paragraphs, you'll need to insert a few characters. For bold, insert <strong> before the words to be in bold, and </strong> afterwards. For paragraphs, you'll need to put <p> before the start of the new paragraph, and </p> where you want the paragraph to end. try it out!

 

Have a test writing your blog to get used to it, but don't worry, until it's linked to a page, people won't be able to see it, and you will be able to delete some parts. Once you're ready for the blog to be viewed, contact jo.hamilton@ouce.ox.ac.uk , and we can link to you.

People can access your blog in a variety of ways - from your profile on the climate explorer pages, or as part of the blogging list. If you tag your blog (see below for tagging info), then people can access your blog via the tag cloud.

An introduction to forums

Forums are a way to discuss different topics online. They are organised into:

• Forums: general areas of discussion. For example ‘Climate change in the media'.
• Topics: Forums are broken down into ‘topics', which focus on a smaller area. For example: ‘The Great Global Warming swindle'.
• Posts: Each of the topics comprises different ‘posts', in date order with the first submitted post staying at the top. The posts are submitted by individual users, by clicking the ‘reply' button at the bottom of the list of posts. You need to be logged in to reply to the forum posts.

Uploading your photos

You can now upload your photos! Once you're logged in, go to 'Your views' page , scroll down to 'upload your photos', and follow the instructions. You can then add selected photos to your blog pages. All photos uploaded this way will be viewable on the online gallery. If your photo is for your profile, please email jo.hamilton@ouce.ox.ac.uk and ask for it to be added to your profile. 

Using Tags

Tags are a way for you to classify your articles and blogs. They provide a way to view a number of differing sources of information about a topic. On the ‘articles' page, you can see an example of a ‘tag cloud'. The size of the word or phrase represents the number of articles on that topic - the larger the word, the more topic tags. If you click on the tag, you can see the list of articles and blogs which are tagged with this word. When you want to add a tag to your blog, click on the tag space in the blog post. There will be a drop down menu of popular tags, which you can choose from, or you can add you own. You can add as many tags as you would like. For example, if an article is about wind energy in Oxfordshire, you might choose the tags of ‘renewable energy', ‘wind', ‘energy', and ‘Oxfordshire'.

Become a "Climate Explorer"

For the ultimate interactive experience, become a climate explorer! In addition to everything described above, you'll be able to create your own page, and put up articles, as well as being involved in the whole climatexchange project. More info about becoming an explorer here.... . Once you've sent in a picture, we can add this to your profile.

Write for ClimateX.org!

We'd love to have a variety of articles written by a variety of people. If you'd like to write for the site, interview people who inspire you, or want to do a photo essay about the sheer beautrry of our world, please get in contact.