Clubs

Clubs

Clubs are available to all members of collectZing. You can create your own, or join others, and participate in discussions about your favorite topics of collecting. If you have a real-world club or group, invite them to join collectZing, and host all of your meeting online, share your objects, and announce club events or meetings.

Starting a Club

If you would like to start a Club, then nothing could be simpler. Click on the 'My Clubs' link in your left hand menu.

You will see a list of the Clubs you are a member of, as well as a link to 'Start a New Club' - click on that link.

You will be taken to a page where you can fill in all the details of the Club. Give the Club a name first. Then decide whether you want to approve the membership of new members, or whether you want to let anyone and everyone join. Next, give the Club a description and some tags. Upload a photo, and then press save!

You now have your own collecting Club! If you choose to approve memberships, you will receive a notification when a new member applies to join, and you can accept or deny their membership.

Now you can post new topics to the Club's forums, or add RSS feeds.

Joining a Club

Click on the 'My Clubs' link in the left hand menu.

If you're not a member of any Clubs yet, then none will show up. So click on the 'Browse All Clubs' link.

You will see a list of all the Clubs on collectZing. Find one you likem

You can resign from a Club at any time.

Posting to the Club forums

Once you are a member of a Club, you can post new topics of discussion, or reply to old ones. To post a new topic, click on the link at the top of the forums.

To view a topic already in progress, click on the topic link.

From there, you can read all of the replies, as well as the original post. Under each post, there is a link to create a reply.

Adding RSS feeds to a Club

For those of you unfamiliar with RSS feeds, they are a common data syndication format, a way for web sites to publish lists of stories, articles and other content, which can then be subscribed to. You can be updated by your favorite sites of any new content, without having to visit their site every day - you can read the updates in a RSS feed aggregator, or you can receive the updates to your email account.

If you have a blog, you most likely are publishing an RSS feed, particularly if you are using one of the mainstream blogging services like Blogger, Typepad and so on. But RSS is not limited to blogs, it's particularly prevalent amongst online media and news web sites, most of these publish one or more feeds.

RSS feeds are often denoted with a little orange icon. It can take a couple of forms, but currently the most popular looks like this:

Each Club can subscribe to as many RSS feeds as the Club President wants. And the feeds are updated constantly, making sure the Club's members have access to all the latest news, views and ideas on their favorite topics.

Subscribing to a feed is a piece of cake. Click the 'Blog & News Feed' option on your Club page

Now click on the 'Manage Feeds' link.

Click the Add New Feed link and type or paste in the URL of the RSS feed you want to subscribe to:

Then click the Save New Feed button. collectZing will then go and retrieve the details of the feed (title, description etc), and the current headlines from the feed and display them: