Shreds and Patches
Tutorial

Shreds and Patches helps you stay involved in your community. It's a place where thousands of people in your social space, even if they are scattered across the globe, can meet to stay informed of what goes on, participate in conversations, get feedback on ideas, brainstorm, organize and plan. It helps you cultivate the social ties and commitments you already have while discovering new people and ideas.

Like many internet tools, such as email, Shreds and Patches can profoundly impact the culture of your community. This five-minute tutorial will demonstrate its specific capabilities.

Fighting Clutter

If you've used email before, you should quickly feel comfortable with Shreds and Patches. The main difference is that instead of sending email to specific mailboxes, you assign categories to articles you write. After you post your article, everyone tracking those categories is notified.

You get to decide for yourself which categories you want to track, and can change your mind at any time. As a bonus, your calendar is automatically updated with events in your tracked categories.

Categories are arranged in a tree reflecting the changing organization of your community. According to the permissions assigned to you, you may be able to add new categories to certain branches of the tree. You may even have a branch all to yourself, reflecting your personal projects.

You Know Best

On the left, you see your private keychain, which keeps track of categories, authors and articles you care about.

When new articles are posted in your keychain, they will be marked with a star and counted. Just click "show all new articles" at the top bar to read everything new, or click on individual keys.

When you're done reading, click "done reading new" at the top bar. All stars will disappear and your keychain will start looking for new articles again. Mistakes are allowed: your keychain remembers your last few clicks on "done reading new." Just click on the summary at the top of your keychain to change how it counts articles as new. You can even make it show everything new for the past week, or everything new from a specific date and time.

Whatever you choose, your keychain will continuously inform you as new articles are posted.

Impulsive?

Add a category, author or article to your keychain just by clicking on it. Remove it the same way. You know best, even as you change your mind.

To find new categories to add, click on the "categories" tab to browse or search within your entire community. You can also add categories to your keychain as you discover them while reading articles. In fact, you can click on any category name or article you see anywhere.

Avoid clutter by organizing your keychain into sections and changing the order of the keys. Because categories are organized in a hierarchy, you can also add many categories at once just by adding the parent and clicking to include all its children. A little green plus sign will appear next to such keys. Click on any key or the "customize" button at the bottom for even more options.

Are you a power user? You will be happy to know that keys can be dragged and dropped from anywhere into your keychain, within your keychain, and to the "drag keys here to remove" bar at the bottom. It's fast.

Finders Keepers

Email only lets you search your private inbox. Shreds and Patches lets you search for information in your entire community, throughout its history. Just click "search" at the top bar.

As you read through the search results, you may discover new categories that would interest you. You can add them to your keychain with a click or a drag-and-drop. Searching is a powerful way to explore what goes on in your community and to expand and diversify your keychain.

Feeling less curious? Click "limit to keychain" while searching to stay within your current interests. Click on individual keys for even more refined searching.

Keep in Touch

On the right, you see your upcoming events sidebar. Click "schedule an event" at the top bar to add your own.

Upcoming events are updated according to your keychain: only events in the categories or by the authors you are tracking appear there. Click on any event summary to read the full article about the event, to which you can respond or cross-reference just like any other article.

Your upcoming events are divided into events happening today, this week, and this month. The "customize" button at the bottom lets you to change this organization. You can even create sections for specific categories of events, such as conferences and birthday parties.

Reader Meets Author

Click the "write new article" button at the top bar to open a blank word processor.

You can add categories to your new article by clicking "add category" or by clicking on categories already in your keychain. Or, just drag-and-drop a category from anywhere into the article. As a shortcut, you can click on any category to start writing in it.

Another important way to start writing is to click "respond" while reading an article. A response can be a quick comment or a lengthy rebuttal. Either way, it will be attached to the parent article. You can, of course, also respond to a response. A "responses" button on the original article lets you follow the entire conversation.

Though responses are by default always categorized the same way as their parent, you may change this. For example, your lengthy response may turn into a article you deem worthy of interest to people tracking other categories.

Multitaskers Unite!

The area in the center is your workspace. This is where you read and write articles.

Your workspace is tabbed, so you can work on many tasks at the same time and quickly switch between them. For example, you can read articles in three different categories while writing two other articles and searching for a specific piece you wish to cross-reference.

Note that you can increase the size of your workspace by dragging aside the keychain and the upcoming events sidebars. With one click, you can also hide them entirely.

Beyond "Reply to All"

Shreds and Patches supports two advanced conversation features:

Wiki. You can change any article, even one written by someone else, if they allowed it. Shreds and Patches remembers previous drafts of each article and automatically gives them version numbers. Click on "history" for any article to see previous versions of it. An editable article, sometimes called a "wiki," can be a very productive space for brainstorming and conversation.

Cross-referencing. Responding to an article isn't always the most appropriate way to reference it. One limitation is that you are limited to responding to only one "parent" article. Cross-referencing is more flexible. Click "add cross-reference" while editing an article to link it to other articles. A link will be embedded into the body of your text, and the original article will show that your article cross-references it. Furthermore, people tracking the referenced article will get notice of your new reference. It's a two-way street. And you may add as many cross-references as you need.

Just Between You and I...

Click on any author to send a quick message that only you two can read. When people send you messages, the "messages" button at the top bar will glow and show the number of incoming messages. At your convenience, you can read them and reply. There no rush! They are stored for a very long time, and you can click on "messages" to read them even if the button isn't flashing.

Somewhere in between email and instant messaging, this straightforward feature is especially useful when you want to respond to the author of an article, but do not want the conversation publicly available.