How to use this site
Become a Registered User
You will get the most out of this site by becoming a registered user. Enter your username of choice and email here and a welcome mail will be sent to the address you entered. The mail will contain a password for your first login. Follow the links in the mail to the login screen, type or copy and paste the password, and you will be logged in. Make sure to then change your password to something you can remember!
Update your account profile
In addition to changing your password, you might want to take the time to update your account profile. In the navigation menu under your username (assuming you're logged in), there is a link 'my account'. Click that and you see your current account profile. Click the tab 'edit' and you will come to the 'account settings' tab where you have the opportunity to:
- Update your username, password and email address
- Decide whether to automatically subscribe (receive email notification of changes) to forum topics where you post
- Upload a picture which represents you online (avatar). This can be a real picture of you, or another image that you want people to associate with you online. You must resize your image in advance to fit the 100x100 pixels and 50 Kb limitations
- Decide whether to display the "Who's new" and "Who's online" blocks in the left hand column
- Enter a signature which will be displayed automatically when you post
- Set your local timezone so that the time and date displays correctly across the site
Next to the 'account settings' tab is the 'musician details' tab. Here you can enter some extra details such as whether you are a composer or a horn player. These will get you listed on the corresponding Hornists and Composers pages.
If you have a personal website you can enter the url in the 'My website' field and it will be listed on your profile page.
Do you have a favorite Kerry Turner piece? Or five? List them in the 'My favorite Kerry Turner pieces' field. Separate the different pieces either by putting them on new lines or with a comma. The result will be links like this one The Casbah of Tetouan which group users and pieces in an interesting way.
Posting to the forums
As a registered user you have the opportunity to participate in forum discussions ranging from the state of modern music to what it is like for an american musician living in Europe. You are welcome to start new threads and discussions as well as post comments in existing threads. You can visit the forums directly or use the What's new? link to see the newest postings on the site. In the Forum topics block on the left you can see which forums are active and which forums are new. Make sure to upload a user picture (avatar) on your user profile page so that people can see who's talking!
Email subscriptions
Do you want to be notified when new content gets added to this site? Are you following an interesting thread in the forums and don't want to miss a single reply? Visit the my subscriptions page where you can decide exactly which content you'd like to monitor. The page is a long list of possible subscriptions starting with individual forum topics and specific blogs, then moving on to whole forum topic categories (such as the American Horn Quartet), the different photo galleries, and finally the various categories of instrumentation. If you subscribe to the category Horn Quartet, for example, you will be notified as soon as Kerry writes another horn quartet and updates the website! You can subscribe or unsubscribe to as many or as few items on the page as you like, and can change them at any time.
RSS and feed readers
If you use a feed reader, a browser that collects or bookmarks RSS, or run a website that aggregates RSS feeds, you can get the latest RSS here. It is always up to date. Read this to learn more about RSS the evolution of the internet.
