New and exciting features on SOT

I wanted to tell everyone that we are about to bring to fruition many community based features on SupportOurTroops.org that we believe will be of great interest to many of you.

The goal of these features is to create a better and more dynamic community to benefit the life and the morale of the troops and their families.

Today we have opened a brand new user forum that is dramatically better than the previous one. Soon we will add other features that will be immediately familiar to anyone that has used, or even just heard of sites like facebook.com, linkedin.com or MySpace.com.

Users on SupportOurTroops.org are already able to view their profiles, upload an "avatar" (a personal picture or graphic) on the profiles and view a list of other members on SOT. As of today we have added the User Forum with the ability to keep track of your posts directly from the user profile page.

In just a few short days we will launch a feature called "Users Home Pages" (UHP) that will allow any registered user of the site to create and maintain their own home pages, photo galleries, writings and anything that strikes your fancy, just like some of you already have at MySpace.com or other similar sites.

Together with the user home pages will will launch "My Blog" a diary style feature that will greatly complement both the profile and the UHP. Each member will be able to post articles in the very flexible Blog style that has been so popular of late. Other users will be able to browse, search and read all your blogs and the authors will be able to send their blogs to the major blog indexing services.

Both these great features can be used by our members completely free of charge, all we require is that you sign in an an SOT member.

There is almost no limit to what you can do with your SOT Community features:

• Post pictures of your son, wife, brother or sister that are currently overseas
• Keep a diary of your deployment (observing the usual rules, naturally)
• Post pictures of your family for the troops to see and let them know you support them
• Repost snippets of article of interest to the troops and their families
• Discuss the topics of the day in the user forum
• Come up with your own news articles for everyone to read

and so much more.

Help needed in the [beta] phase

However, all these features are not easy to set up. Most will need your patience for certain, and in some cases we may need your help.

If you would like to volunteer a bit of your time to help us perfect the UHP and the My Blog, do let us know. We will be very grateful. SOT is a grass root organization with a very small staff and there is just so many hours in the day.

Your help in fine tuning and generating user documentation for these new features and the website in general will be greatly appreciated. You need not be a technical wiz. In fact, users of all technical levels are needed to develop a comprehensive help system and a work flow that will allow even the most un-technical of users to make their contribution know.

Become an SOT Beta Tester: contact me personally if you'd like to help.

In the meantime, please visit the forum and introduce yourself and keep an eye out for our new exciting features.