OVERVIEW
The Te.leport.me system is both a personal landmarking system and a social bookmarking application (http://te.leport.me) built just for Second Life locations. Think Del.icio.us, but for SLURLS, and with a flexible but low-lag in-world client.
At its simplest, the Te.leport.me HUD is a personal landmark manager that allows you to privately bookmark an unlimited number of locations, organized any way you like and stored in a permanent database, so you never have to worry about losing your HUD, resetting it, upgrading, or anything like that. Your bookmarks are always there. It also offers Back/Forward teleport buttons and a record of your history for up to 30 days, no matter how many times you teleport.
But the benefits don’t stop there. You can also post public bookmarks, which visitors to the site can see and explore for themselves. Surf the te.leport.me website to see places other residents have posted by tag or via search, and put your friends on a watchlist so you can see each other’s choices.
CREATING AN ACCOUNT
TE.LEPORT.ME stores your favorite locations in an off-world database using the http://te.leport.me website. This enables you to share you bookmarks with others, view/edit/sort your own bookmarks from the website, and easily upgrade or wear new copies of your HUD without losing any of your old locations. It also allows you to store an unlimited number of bookmarks, rather than the 30 or 40 that would be possible using only scripts.
When you wear a TE.LEPORT.ME HUD for the first time, you’ll be prompted to create an account. Creating an account is free, easy, spam-free, and takes about 30 seconds. You just need to decide on a password (not your Second Life password, please) and put in an email in case you lose your password. Once you’ve created your account, you’re all set to start bookmarking locations.
Your email will not be shared with anybody, for any reason, nor will it ever be used to send unsolicited mailings. It will not be displayed on your profile. There are no newsletters. The ONLY thing the email is for is for recovering lost passwords.
THE HUD INTERFACE
The Te.leport.me HUD has 5 buttons:
- Back - This brings up the last location you visited on the map
- Forward - If you’ve gone back, clicking forward will bring up the location you jumped back from on the map
- History - This will bring up a menu of locations you’ve visited in the last 30 days
- Bookmark - Marks this location as a bookmark
- Browse - Allows you to browse your bookmarks by filter or tag
Additionally, clicking anywhere on the interface that is not a button will bring up the help menu.
UNDERSTANDING TAGS & FILTERS
The Te.leport.me website uses tagging to sort through bookmarks. If you’ve ever used a Del.icio.us, Wordpress, Flickr, etc. you should be familiar with how tags work. A tag is a short word that functions somewhat like a category, except that you can tag a bookmark with as many tags as you like. You can later use those tags on the website in order to find groups of related bookmarks.
However, using tags on a 12-button menu in the game would get tedious - after all, the idea of tags is to add as many as you like, and sorting through all those tags could get complicated. So we’ve added a Filter option for the HUD. Filters are basically groups of tags, and help you to sort through your bookmarks like you would through folders.
For instance, if you had this filter:
Clothing: shopping, clothes, hud
It would show up as “Clothing” in your filter menu and return only bookmarks with all three of those tags (shopping, clothes, and hud) attached.
By default, TE.LEPORT.ME uses filters for tagging and retrieving bookmarks from the HUD. There are a few sample filters in a notecard inside the HUD, but you should feel free to delete, edit, or add your own. The idea is to have 8 to 10 common filters for easy menu navigation, but you can have up to 50 if you’re a bookmarking maniac.
BOOKMARKING A LOCATION
To place a bookmark, simply click the bookmark (pushpin) button. Clicking this button will bring up a list of your custom filters to file the bookmark under. Select which filter you’d like, and the HUD will post the bookmark to the website (using the parcel’s title and description) and offer you a link to edit it. Follow the link to change the title, add your own description, change the visibility (public, private, or shared), or add/remove tags.
By default, bookmarks are posted as private, which means only you will be able to access them, either by using the HUD or logging on to the website at http://te.leport.me. To post a bookmark as public (you can change this at any time by editing the bookmark on the website), use the [ << Public ] button in the Bookmark menu.
VIEWING YOUR BOOKMARKS
To use your bookmarks, click the Browse (star) button. Clicking this button will bring up a list of your filters to browse by (use the [ << Tags ] button to browse by tags instead). When you’ve found the bookmark you want, click the number that corresponds and your location will be brought up on the map, ready for you to teleport!
TELEPORT HISTORY
The History button brings up a list of your teleported locations within the last 30 days. By default, it is sorted by date, showing the most recently visited locations first. When sorted by date, it shows the teleports in the order you made them (excluding back and forward jumps).
You may also sort by title, which will display the list of unique locations you’ve visited in the last 30 days in alphabetical order, using the parcel title. To sort by title, use the [ << Options ] button and select “Sort by Title.”
BACK AND FORWARD
The back and forward buttons on the HUD work much like they do on a web browser. If back/forward locations are not available, the buttons will be inactive (dark). Otherwise, click on either button to bring up the appropriate location on the map.
In keeping with the web-browser model, once you’ve teleported back a step in your history, you can go back a step before that as well, and so on, until you reach the point you were at when you logged in for this session. Just like quitting/restarting your web browser, the << Back / Forward >> function resets for each login.
If you wish to go back two or three steps instead of one, or if you need to revisit a location you were at during the last time you were logged in (or the time before that, etc.) use the History function.
Note that the back/fwd buttons work whether or not you have History recording enabled.
QUIRKS, TIPS, AND TRICKS
Here are a few things you should understand about how TE.LEPORT.ME works, in addition to some tips and tricks for maximizing your use of it.
- Double postings - It’s easy to forget you’ve marked a location before. For this reason, TE.LEPORT.ME treats bookmarks within 24m of each other as the same place. If you accidentally bookmark a location that’s very close to a location you’ve already bookmarked, TE.LEPORT.ME will update the location rather than creating a new one. If you want to bookmark multiple locations very close (< 24m) to each other, you can still manually enter the locations on the website.
- No-script land - As of version 1.01, the TE.LEPORT.ME HUD will work on script-restricted land; however, you must be wearing the HUD when you enter the parcel.
- Manual posts - If you need to mark a location that has script restrictions, you can easily do so on the website. In Second Life, click the “Map” button and select “Copy SLURL to clipboard,” then visit http://te.leport.me and add a landmark, pasting that SLURL as the address. You can also create a landmark at the script-restricted location, and import it into your hud once you’re back on less paranoid ground.
- History recording - The history records each teleport as a specific item, whether you teleport between sims or within the same sim. Note that the history records the location you were at when you teleported out of a location, rather than the location you were at when you teleported in. This is designed to help you track your movements easier.
- Tags - Remember that tags are one-word, lower-case, and with no spaces or unusual characters. This is done automatically; if you tag something “Clothing Store” from the HUD, the tag will be posted as “clothingstore.”
- TIP: Bookmark at the teleport point. Unlike a webpage, which has a static, specific address, a parcel has literally hundreds of possible SLURLs, because the SLURL includes the exact x, y, and z coordinates. Bookmarking your location at the teleport point ensures that your SLURL for that location matches others’, which helps the site to identify popular parcels that have been marked by others as well. This is only needed if you’re posting a public bookmark.
- TIP: Create your own filters. We’ve included sample filters in the HUD which are designed to cover most user’s general categorizing needs. There’s no reason, however, to keep those samples as-is: you should customize them to your interests. You can add as many filters as script memory will allow (we’re guessing about 50 or 60 if you want) but it’s generally easier to keep it to under 11, which is the number that will fit on one dialog menu for faster browsing. Note that filters are the only data that is local - that is, specific to the HUD and not copied over into each new HUD. This is so that you may create multiple HUDs for different browsing purposes. If you’re creating multiple copies of the HUD (say, if you want one in each outfit folder), copy your configured HUD to make sure your filters are the same across bookmarks.
- TIP: List your most common filters first. We’ve designed the menu so that your filters will show up in exactly the order they’re listed on the notecard, so put your most common filters at the top!
- TIP: Use your filters to sub-categorize. Since filters are basically tag combinations, you can create sub-categories out of your filters. For instance, you could create filters for each shopping category, tagged with “shopping” and the genre of items (say, Clothing: shopping, clothing, hud) as well as an overall Shopping filter (say, Shopping: shopping, hud), allowing you to browse ALL shopping items or just Clothing.
- TIP: Include the tag ‘hud’ in all your filters. We’ve done this in the example; let’s explain why. You may want to tag a lot of items that you don’t necessarily want cluttering up your HUD menus. By including the tag ‘hud’ in all of your filters, you can specifically mark the bookmarks you want in your HUD, and keep them separate from the ones you only want to access through the site. You don’t have to use ‘hud’ (you could use ‘inworld’ for instance), but tagging it ‘hud’ allows people to see which public postings you like enough to keep in your HUD.
- TIP: Bookmark everything. The joy of unlimited bookmarks is the freedom to bookmark anything your heart desires. There’s no reason, with all these tagging and filtering options, not to mark just about everything you like. You can keep a couple of your filter categories small for easy browsing, and tag the rest for storage on the website, where you have search tools, cross-tagging filters, and date / title / region sorting options to find all your favorite locations again.
- TIP: Post public bookmarks. By default, bookmarks are posted as private (just to make sure you don’t accidentally post that BDSM place you secretly love for all your friends and customers to see), but you can post as Public from the HUD or on the website. Everybody benefits from public bookmarks; it’s a great way to find new locations people actually like instead of just search results in SL that have been unnaturally boosted by campers and bots.
- TIP: Add personal descriptions. By default, the HUD uses the parcel title/description as the bookmark values, just to keep things one-click easy. But when posting public bookmarks, it’s always a good idea to edit them on the website, adding your own personal spin or compliment so people know why you like a place.
- TIP: Rename your most common locations. While parcel titles, which usually contain the name of the store/attraction/club you’re marking, will do 90% of the time, you don’t have to stick with the parcel title as your bookmark. Follow the edit link after it’s posted to rename your common personal locations (like “My House” or “Our Private Beach”).
PRIVACY
TE.LEPORT.ME respects your privacy completely. By default, all of your bookmarked locations are set to private (use the [ << Public ] button to share them with others), and may not be seen by anybody but you (either from your HUD or when logged into http://te.leport.me). Your history is also password-encrypted and only accessible to you through your own HUD.
Additionally, the data is stored in the database as aggregated data, without your Second Life name attached. This means that even our database admins cannot view your history, passwords, or unshared favorites. As such, we cannot retrieve your password or history data - you will need to use the automated password recovery page if you forget your password or can’t log in.
History data is stored in a separate database and will never be viewable from the website. If you wish to share places you’ve been, you’ll need to post them as public bookmarks. Additionally, your history will automatically be cleared to show only the last 30 days worth of teleports.
You may turn history recording off /clear your history at any time, if, for instance, you are concerned about other people whom you have given access to your Second Life account viewing your history from the HUD. (You should never, at any time or for any reason, allow others to access your Second Life account however).
CHANGELOG
This section documents each change made to the release version
- Version 1.01 (released 26 Apr 2009)
- Added ability to work on no-script land
- Fixed menu bug which prevented history recording from being re-enabled
- Fixed text bug which added slashes before apostrophes
- Entries with no title now recorded with location as title
- Version 1.0 (released 22 Apr 2009)
- Release version
some where in the manual you need to explain that the notecard must be edited to make changes to the category buttons - you are not clear on that at all - and to blithely say that everyone understands how tags work is just wrong !
And i’m a big fan of yours - i’ve purchased two of these