The Landing offers a huge range of facilties for you to share things with others, make connections with people, communicate,  and form communities. This is a very brief overview of some of the main features, but is not comprehensive. Do feel free to explore the site and discover its many facilities.

The top bar

The top bar gives you quick access to many of the site tools and faciltiies, including:

The home page for the site

Clicking the Landing logo or the title 'Athabasca Landing' at the top of the page will take you to the site home page, which contains much up to date information and links to what others have been doing across the whole site (only those things they have made available to the public or logged in users, of course!)

Your Profile page

Next to the Landing logo on the top bar is your profile image, which is a link to your own profile page, where you can change what others see about you and the layout and content of your profile page. This is rather like your home page on the site. You can choose how much or how little different people and groups can see, from the whole world down to a single individual. You can configure how it looks to other people and what it contains using a very simple drag and drop interface.

The Dashboard

This is your private space on the site that you can configure how you wish to contain the things that you want to pay attention to or that you use most often. Like the Profile, it has an easy drag and drop interface.

Tools

The tools menu is a drop-down list that takes you to the main functions of the site. You'll probably find yourself using this quite a lot as, for each tool, the menu lets you see what others have done as well as letting you add your own things. The tools include:

• Blogs: see (and maybe comment on) other people's blogs and write your own
• Bookmarks: see (and maybe comment on) other people's shared bookmarks (links to web pages on this site and others) and share your own
• Event calendar: see events that may be of interest and add/share your own
• Files: see (and maybe comment on) files others have shared and share your own
• Friends: see what your friends have been doing
• Groups: see the groups that are available to join, or create and manage your own. Groups can share files, have discussions, share bookmarks, share a single blog, write web pages, conduct polls, sharew calendars and much more. Some are free to join, others require permission from their owner and some are by invitation only. If you create a group, you decide how people can join it!
• Members: see the people on the system, with links to their profiles. When you look at their profiles, you can choose to add them as a friend, which makes it easier to send messages, find out what they are doing and so on (if they allow you to do so).
• Pages: see (and maybe comment on or, if they let you, make changes to) web pages others have written, and write your own
• Photos: see photo albums others have shared and make and share your own
• Polls: see polls others have set and maybe set your own polls, quizzes and questionnaires.
• The wire: see what others have posted, or write your own wire posts. Always public, a maximum of 140 characters in length so they are short and succinct. Very much like Twitter (and, if you have a Twitter account, you can send your Wire posts to it automatically)

Messages

The icon that looks like an envelope lets you see messages others have sent to you and send messages to others that you know (friends and groups). It will inform you if you have messages waiting by turning red.

Settings

This option lets you change how the system behaves, such as whether you receive notification emails or the user name and password it uses to get or send information to or from elsewhere (such as Twitter).

Search

Does what it says! It is not a full text search, but looks for tags and other information such as the interests people have expressed in their profiles (so remember to use tags to describe anything you add!). It shows results grouped according to the tools etc that relate to them (e.g. photos, blog posts, groups, etc).