Site Help

Need help figuring something out?? Look in here. If you dont find an answer please let us know so we can get something posted to help others out.

 

Note: This link is for Moderators Only.Thanks!


About the message boards

 To communicate we used message boards on MSN groups. Here at Shutterfly we also have message boards. They are however layed out differently. Please look on the left of this screen in the "Pictures to help" list. Under that click on and open the file "messageboard1.jpg". This is a picture of how the message boards are layed out.

 We have the ability to put message boards anywhere on the pages. This will help productivity. For example a pattern designer can go to the "Pattern Design" area and everything including the approval message board will be on the same page so they dont have to jump around looking for things like on MSN. It will take a little while to get a feel for it but so did MSN and this will really help the project more.


Pattern design area

Number 1 is the pattern attempt album. This is where you load in your pictures of your own pattern attempts.

Number 2 is the Family Request album. This is where Diane will load in pictures sent directly from the family members to be used in making patterns from.

Number 3 is where approved patterns will be loaded in. Our cutters list manager Bill will assign these patterns to cutters and place them in the next album. This area is only used by Bill. Of course you will see the names in case you would like to see if it's a service member in your location.

Number 4 is the list of patterns that are assigned and waiting for the cutters to download and complete the cutting of. If you are assigned a cutting to do this is the area that you should find your pattern to download from and cut out. 

Number 5 is the completed list. Once the portrait is cut out and approved by Frank he sends the cutter the family contact information and they send the portraits to the family. The completed area shows that the pattern has been delivered and completed. After a period of time Gary will be backing up these patterns as an archive in case they may be needed later.

 A lot more goes into it than this but this kind of sums up this area for a quick overview.

Moderators

 

 


Load your finished cutting picture

  1. Log onto the site
  2. Go to the "Member Area"
  3. In the "Member Area" click on the "Finished Portraits" album. (near the top of the page)
  4. You will see "Add Pictures" on the right. Click on "Add Pictures".
  5. The box pictured below will appear.
  6. Click on the "Upload" tab and then click on "Add Pictures".
  7. Find your picture of your cutting that you saved on your computer and open it.
  8. Your file name of your picture should be displayed in the white box. If not you did not find and add the picture.
  9. Click the button on the bottom left, "Upload Pictures".
  10. Your picture should now be loaded in the album for us to review. If the box remains open and you see the text, "completed" next to your image file name then its done and you can manually close the box. The box will not close after you load your picture for some reason.


Load your pattern attempt

 
  1. Go to "Pattern Design" area.
  2. Click on "Pattern Attempt" album near the top of the page.
  3. Click on "Add Pictures" on the right.
  4. The box below will appear.
  5. Click on the "Upload" tab.
  6. Click on "add pictures"
  7. Find your pattern picture and open it.
  8. The file name of your pattern should be seen in the white box at this point. If not you did not choose it from your computer and add it.
  9. Click on "Upload Pictures" button on the bottom left of the box.
  10. This should load your pattern into the album for us to critique. You will have to close the box after you load the picture. It does not close automatically for some reason.


Please post requests for tutorials on site operation

Problems uploading a picture?

Take a look at the following to see if it helps any problems that you may encounter loading pictures onto our site:

Uploading your pictures may require several steps. If you are experiencing difficulties in uploading your images, try the following:

1) Make sure that your image file names and the folders containing them are short and do not contain any special characters. File names should only have letters, numbers, hyphens (-) and underscores (_). If your images filenames are long or contain unsupported characters your images will likely not upload properly. For example, characters such as ",%*/&!|$@{^` may cause a problem.

2) Make sure that your images are not buried in sub folders. Images should be stored in no more than two sub folders.

3) Try re saving your images in the proper format. If you have used Photoshop (or any other image-editing program) to adjust your images, please ensure the following settings are met:
- Images should be in the JPG format
- Image should be in the RGB or sRGB colorspace and not the CMYK colorspace
- When saving images in Photoshop, make sure the images are saved as Baseline Standard. Images saved as Progressive will fail at upload.

4) Problems uploading can sometimes be linked to a variety of Internet filtering applications, such as pop-up blockers, ad blockers, and/or firewall applications such as ZoneAlarm, BlackICE Defender, McAfee or Norton Internet Security. If you are running any of these types of applications, we recommend disabling them or turning them off completely while visiting our site.

Pictures to help

messageboard1.jpg


Malware

If your browser is hijacked and doing strange things that you dont want it to do and your antivirus program will not fix the problem you may have malware infections in your browser. This is a free program that will scan and get rid of them. Malware contains program code that will get your private codes to things so if you think your computer is compromised it may be a good idea to change your passwords to sensitive things that you do online.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

If your computer is very slow you may have little programs called "bots" and its reffered to as "spyware" that fill up on your computer. They watch what you do on the internet and report back for marketing purposes. Its good to run a spyware program at least every other week if you are on the computer a good bit.

Here are some good programs off of CNET:

http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-Anniversary-Edition/3000-8022_4-10045910.html?tag=contentBody;mostPopTwoColWrap&cdlPid=10998841


Downloading a pattern to cut

  1. Go to "Member Area" and click on "Approved Patterns" album near the top of the page.
  2. Click on the picture of the pattern that you have been assigned to cut out.
  3. Click on the text to the right that says, "Download this picture" and save the file to your hard drive. This is done to copy the pattern at full size.
  4. Once copied you can then go to that file you copied it to and print the picture out to begin your cutting.

 


Downloading a Picture to make a pattern

  1. Go to Pattern Design" area.
  2. Click on the "Family Request" album near the top of the page.
  3. Click on a picture of a service member that has not aready had a pattern approved for it.
  4. Click on the text, "download this picture" to the right of the picture.
  5. Save the picture to a file on your computer. You need to download the picture to get it at full size.
  6. Now you can open the picture you saved with your graphics program and begin your pattern work.

Email settings

To change your email settings:

You can get daily emails like with MSN.
Go to the site
click on "see all members"
find your name and on the right click "edit"
along the top are tabs.
click on the outgoing tab
here you can set what you want for updates.

The default is "never" so no messges will go to your persoal email inbox.

You can change this to "Daily" or "Weekly"

Dont choose the "individual changes". This notifies every member of every thing you do on the site. This feature is something that will not really benefit our project. 

MSN groups had big issues with this. Lets hope this is a feature that this ste has worked out well. If you experience a problem give it a day or two because they may be working on the servers or backing something up. If after a few days you still have problems let us know so we can look into it.


Another way to add a picture to the shared albums on this site

Another way to add a picture to a shared album on our site like the "pattern attempt" album

Lets assume that you have a pattern made up and you wish to add your pattern attempt to the "pattern attempt" album.

First you need to go to that album and to the right you will see this:

The circled area above is what you click on to add your pattern attempt to this album for review by a moderator.

The next screen is shown:

The blue circle shows your shutterfly albums. You will have different ones than those that are displayed here. You will need to make an album to load your pattern attempt into and from there you can insert it into the shared album. We will go over this. The green circle is a way that you can email a picture into the album.

For now you can click on the orange circled tab, "Upload". The next screen appears:

Now on this screen you can click on ""add pictures" and find your pattern attempt that you saved on your own computers hard drive. Once you choose your picture file from your computer and click on open it will load the file name of that picture into the box on the screen. After that you can click on the "Upload Pictures" button and it will load your image right into the album for the moderators to review. This is the absolute easiest way to load your pattern attempt.

If a problem comes up to where you cannot add your pattern attempt this way you will then have to set up an album on your shutterfly account and load the picture in there first. We will discuss this next.

Look to the right of the same picture above and you will see the text, "Use Shutterfly uploaders". Click on this text.

The next screen opens:

In this screen you can click on "choose files" and pick the patterns or pictures you want to load into your shutterfly album that we are about to create. Note that this album we create will be for you alone and attached to your shutterfly account. It has nothing to do with the project site album that we use to hold patterns in to be critiqued called, "Pattern Attempt". You will later be able to pull pictures from your shutterfly album into our shared album.

Once you pick your pattern or picture the name of those files will be displayed in the box. The next thing you have to do is to send the pictures into your shutterfly account. You can do this in two ways. One is by choosing the red circled option "Add to a new album" this will create a new album in your account that you can name. You should do this the first time to set up an album. Just name it something like, "Pictures for Portrait Freedom". The other way or if you are doing this for a second time is to pick the blue circled option, "Add to an existing album:" drop down that list and choose the album that you already have associated with your account. Then click "start" and the pictures you have selected will be added to your shutterfly album. Once the program loads your pictures you can close the screen. The "add pictures" screen is still showing at this time with the three tabs: "shutterfly", "upload" and "add via email" on it.

Click on the "shutterfly" tab again and then click on the text at the bottom of that box, "Refresh album list". After you do this you should see the new album that you have created,"Pictures for Portrait Freedom". Click on that new album and you should see your picture on the right hand side as shown here:

Let's say that I just created the album on the left that is highlighted. The picture on the right could be my pattern attempt. Click on the +Add button below the picture that you want to add into the "pattern attempt" album and click on the button "done" at the bottom right when it shows that your picture has been added.

Bingo! You just added a picture into the "pattern attempt" album. It may take a couple seconds to load in the album but it will go in there.

At this point the moderators will take over and critique the pattern attempt. If it needs no further adjustments that the member needs to correct they will move it to the approved album and it will be on its way in the process.

This seems like a lot of steps but we are taking it step by step and explaining things. After you do this two or three times you will have it down.

If something needs explained or if this is not working for you please post a message in the general message board.



11/23/2009 10:01:02 PM