*** From the Archives ***
This article is from November 10, 2009, and is no longer current.
Announcing InDesignSecrets Free Membership!
We’re very excited to announce a new feature at InDesignSecrets.com: Free membership! You’ll notice a “Become a Member” link in the upper-right corner of the home page (or in the black bar under our logo in any inside page) … try it out! It only takes about 2 minutes to join.
Why Become a Member?
- Forums: One of the best reasons to join is to post on the forums… which will launch in another day or two. We’re just putting the final touches on getting it ready. All users will be able to read the forums, but to post your own question or reply, you’ll need to sign up for a free membership. Forum posts can also show your face, if you use the free gravatar.com service.
- Bonus Tips & Techniques: On occasion, we’ll post bonus tips or information that only members that are logged in can see.
- Newsletter: Now you can get InDesignSecrets in your email In Box! The newsletter comes with links to recent blog posts, bonus tips, discount offers, and cool weekly InDesign tips & tricks.
- Discounts and Freebies: Members get discounts to ebooks, webinars, and commercial products.
Bonus Tip
[suma notLoggedInMsg=’Sorry, but you must be logged in as a member to see this cool bonus tip! Click Become a Member. It’s easy!
‘ restrictedTo=”All Free Memberships” ]Hey, if you’re reading this, you signed in as a member! Congratulations and thanks for joining us.
Here’s a tip for members: Let’s say you need to type a special glyph (character) into various documents, but it’s kind of obscure and you don’t want to keep searching through the Glyph panel for it. Why not just make a keyboard shortcut for it? Insert it once with the Glyphs panel, and it’ll show up in the first position in the Recently Used Glyphs section of the panel. Now use Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, set the Product Area to Panel Menus, and scroll down to “Glyph: Insert Most Recent Glyph”. If you assign a shortcut to that, it’s like assigning a shortcut to that special character. (Well, at least until the next time you choose a different glyph from the Glyphs panel.) [/suma]
What if You Don’t Want to Join?
Now, we know that some of you (yes, you know who you are) don’t like signing up for anything. That’s okay. The majority of blog posts on indesignsecrets.com will still be open to all readers; you can read all the new forum posts; you’ll still have access to the free audio and video podcasts… So please refrain from yelling at us that we’re somehow “selling out.” After all, indesignsecrets is all about the InDesign community — and the best way to create community is to create a space where we can all belong, share, and learn. Come join us!
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I signed up immediately and thank you.
doc
I think it is the other right, errr upper left corner.
Yeah… in the current site design, the signup/signin is in the upper-right on the Home page, and in the black bar in the upper-left on all the other pages. Someday we’ll redesign it to be more consistent. (But you know, as Colin Higgins once wrote, consistency is not really a human trait…) ;)
how to post on this forum?
Click Forums in the nav bar at top. You must be signed in as a member to create a new topic.
Post is fixed …
We actually wanted it to be more “in the background” on the interior pages, and the black bar was perfect for that.
AM
Good idea. I’ve signed up. One tiny complaint: rounded corners on the avatars.
LTM
The only thing missing from the user agreement seems to be a section about privacy/information sharing (by you to 3rd parties).
Nice to see registration. Finally a way to make sure everyone is who they say they are, or at least across comments :)
I am not getting the verification code at all, do I need to wait longer, I have given it over an hour so far?
I am using Firefox, on a Mac running Tiger.
I had to wait two hours for mine, and when I copied it to the page (which I had kept open) it told me the code wasn’t accepted.
Worked fine for me on Firefox using Windows XP (I’m so behind the times here lol)
And signed up fine, but one of the registration emails went into my spam folder. Make sure to check that spam folder.
I’m on board!
The confirmation code should arrive very quickly. In our tests, it usually shows up in about 1 minute.
However, as Hank pointed out, it sometimes gets caught in a spam filter! Frustrating.
I did find in one early test that it took about 2 hours to get the confirmation email, but after investigation, it turned out that the email was sent immediately, but it got slowed down by the recipient’s mail server. Nothing we can do about that, unfortunately.
I have to admit that having to keep the confirmation code web page open until you do get the number is also frustrating to me. We are working on a solution for that, but I don’t expect our developer to be able to change it for a couple of months.
Got it – yeah the spam filter had it all along (blush), but now I am on board. I look forward to more great ID info.
And the odd heated/informative discussion about Id and workflow etc ?
Ah yes, the email isn’t as instantaneous as everyone thinks. It bounces from mail server to server with no idea of how long it will spend at each stop. There could be overloaded mail servers, these also cause a delay, if everyone signs up at the same time there could be delays either from InDesignSecrets end or from the mail receivers end. Usually messages will reside on a mail server for a few days and they will keep attempting to send.
Someone just emailed me with a great question: “What is the difference between becoming a member and subscribing or do I need to both?”
Sorry about the confusion! In all the excitement, I forgot to update that Subscribe page (the link above the Search field). My apologies. It is now updated.
Up ’til now, subscribing on that page would only sign you up for the newsletter, but not sign you up as a member on the site. Now, the best thing to do is to sign up as a member on the site — that gets you membership and the newsletter.
Only one downside. My user-name needs to be five or more char.
Ed.
Just one comment. After signing in, you then send a confirmation of the userid and password in clear text over email! You take the time to do a double verification to get signed up, but then take no precautions with the password for that account. I suspect that if I changed the password, I would get a similar confirmation.
Not that I think the world will end should someone get into my account on this site. That is why I am not nitpicking that the login page isn’t SSL encrypted. It just doesn’t seem very secure that any password is sent via email.
Did my bit for the board and signed on. It took all of 2 seconds for my verification code to come through via email. That’s a happy story, right! ;)
Thanks for the opportunity.
I’m in! Thanks so much!
I have to say, the tab at the top that says “Provide payment information” almost put me off joining, until I realised that it was skipped over. It looked like this was going to be “free” rather than free.
@skilldrick: I totally agree… I argued with the person who wrote the subscription software to remove that, but it turns out that it’s harder to customize code than it seems. We’ll try to find a way to make it more obvious that “free” really does mean free. :)
I’ve waited more than 24 hours for my code and still have not received it. I tried it again this morning. Still nothing. Does InDesignSecrets.com hate me?
@Hill: Not at all — we want you to join! In general, you should receive the confirmation email after about 1 or 2 minutes!
In almost all cases where the confirmation email doesn’t show up, it has gotten caught in a spam filter. In a few cases, however, the person’s mail server has held it for some other weird reason.
If you have a different email that you can use, I would try that. For example, perhaps set up a free gmail or yahoo mail account and see if the email gets through to there.
Signed up, thanks for the “free” offer! Looking forward to all the InDesign secrets coming my way. – Deano