It's been 4 months since we opened The American Woodworker.  And I would like to say thank you to all our members who have supported us in the past few months.  We are young, and still very, very small.  But that's OK. We will build our membership in time, and with that increase in membership will come greater content and a wealth of knowledge.

For now though I would like to ask all who are here a couple questions, and if you could answer here on this discussion thread, The American Woodworker would really like to hear what your thoughts are.

How do you like TAW, how are you getting along with our format, is the format easy to use, are you happy with the content.

And, is there anything you all would like see here, more of, less of, what's missing.

Thank you all for your support and thank you for your responses.

John Morris
The American Woodworker

John,

I guess I am easy, but I really like the format. It seems easy to move around. I am sure there are things that I have not tried yet, but for the most part it has all been good.

I like the ease of uploading picture but in the forums and to your personal page.

I really like seeing the slide show. I have seen things there that I did not see posted in the woodworking forum. It reminded me to check out the pictures posted on a person page.

I like being able to post a video right in a discussion or reply.

It is also easy to insert a quote or part of a quote when replying to someones message.

Although I don't use it all the time, I do check the chat section often. It is nice to be able to just ask someone a question or discuss an issue without having to wait for a reply in a message forum.

The think I like best or the members. We have a very good group of members all willing to share and help others.

Now, the things I have experienced problems with are the smileys. Not that it is huge, but I have had problems getting them in the message or getting them to show up. Wouldn't keep me away though.

I haven't noticed it as much lately, but I have had problems getting the icons to show up on the reply bar. I have had the issue with both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Again, it is not a killer, but usually when it isn't there is when I want to put a picture in the message. Sometimes I have gone out of the message and then re-opened it and they show up.

I guess that is it for me. I have a lot more likes than dislikes.

I am very thankful to The American Woodworker. Without his dream, this wouldn't be.

Very well John, I am happy you have found navigating the site and using the features relatively siimple.

As far as the smiileys, we are in the process in looking for another smiley source. The one we have now is problematic. I am beta testing a few now as we speak, and once we find one that interacts well with our site, we'll purchase the rights to it and inject it into our network. Since day one, we have had some issues with smiley's.

Your experience with the picture loader not showing up is new, I will check into that and see if there is a toggle that needs to be flipped on our end and or something that is conflicting with the browsers. Thanks for the heads up on that John.

Hi Josh, can you elaborate when you get time on exactly which bugs your experiencing? Thank you.

Joshua D. Rollins said:

Other than a few bugs in the software as mentioned I enjoy visiting the site very much. I don't really check out the kudo fest much anymore.

Hey Larry, I think you are still copying pasting your existing blogs into our editor right? If that is so, you are right, there is going to be a glitch on our side that at this point, not much is going to be done about it. That is way too deep for this backwoodsman to figure out. If you right the blog directly into the editor, it appears as you would like it. What you can do, is copy your blog to our editor, then go through it and create the spaces that you would normally like to see. Let me know if that works Larry. Or if you need clarification of what I just stated here, let me know either way. Because I think I just confused myself here, huh?????

Larry Jenkins said:

Well, John.. You know me by now. I do have one concern so far..

Other than having to learn where all the bells and whistles are and educating myself on "how to get there and do it," Here's something you might want to fix. I will preface the concern with a description as to why I think TAW needs it.

When I worked as a Senior Administrative Procedures Writer for Iowa's only Nuclear Power Plant, some of the important requirements for written instructions were clarity, understandability and most important was, easy to read.

All the Blogs I have posted on TAW were written with all these criteria in mind. Here's the concern:

When I post a Blog, the TAW software automatically removes all spaces between paragraphs and other white space , making the whole Blog one big paragraph.

Go over to the WOOD site and read a finishing question that was answered by Steve Mickley. His responses are not only very long, but all one paragraph, making his responses very hard to read. At least for me, so I won't read them.

Larry

Or you could copy and paste each paragraph and put the spaces in between them as you copy and paste.

That should give you the format you are looking for.

The American Woodworker said:

Hey Larry, I think you are still copying pasting your existing blogs into our editor right? If that is so, you are right, there is going to be a glitch on our side that at this point, not much is going to be done about it. That is way too deep for this backwoodsman to figure out. If you right the blog directly into the editor, it appears as you would like it. What you can do, is copy your blog to our editor, then go through it and create the spaces that you would normally like to see. Let me know if that works Larry. Or if you need clarification of what I just stated here, let me know either way. Because I think I just confused myself here, huh?????

Larry Jenkins said: