So... I was bored today. Didn't feel like working. Read the IRC transcript from yesterday; started playing with slashdot. Here are the most useful things I learned poking around and asking questions:

1) You can add the year to date outputs!

Go into Your Info and under "Homepage" change the date format to one that has a year. (Duh, it seems so obvious in hindsight. But I *can't* be the only dumb bunny who overlooked that. Can I? Can I???)

2) You can change the text-field width to 80 characters.
Go into Your Info; under Comments, near the bottom is a field called Comment Box Size.

3) You can find the most recent journal entries site-wide.

Go to "search"; select "Journals" and "Search" (with no text in the field). Or visit this link. Voila. Or, you can log out and select "journals".

4) You can find all active user-created discussions.

What's a user-created discussion? See my last journal entry. Anyway, Michael took pity on my floundering around and told me you can visit http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?op=user_created_index to see the active user-created discussions.

I just created a "New Discussion" in slashdot called "Meta Slashdot". I'm rather curious what the point to new discussions are, since as far as I can see, they are only linked from the list of posts on my User Info page.

I would love to see a thriving discussion of meta-slashdot, but I'm not certain what the method of starting that would be. Buying OSDN Self-Serve ads to publicize? Posting to Kiro5hin? Emailing anybody who posts to /. to tell them? (Just kidding about the last one).

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Addition, 7 March 2002, 10pm: michael tells me new discussions are useful for just that, discussions by users. But unlike the journal entries, user-added discussion entries go stale and evaporate two weeks after they are created.

Which is why I added this note, since his explanation will go away in two weeks...