Below is the text of an email sent out to all registered users, it is just a basic confirmation for registered users, an easy way to back out, and some ds106 site housekeeping details.

Hello,
If you are receiving this email then chances are you signed up for the open and online Digital Storytelling course. It should be a blast, and we are only days away from getting started. If you’ve changed your mind about this whole thing, we understand—I’ve flirted with the idea myself—and you can simply login to ds106.us and delete your account. Here’s a quick tutorial (http://ds106.us/wiki/index.php?title=Deleting_your_ds106_account). If you have any problems, send me an email at [email protected]

In the meantime, this might be a good time to take care of some housekeeping details for the ds106.us site.

1) Updating your ds106 Profile
You might want to login to the http://ds106.us site and update your directory information if you haven’t yet. This includes a link to your blog, twitter account, YouTube, Flickr, etc. You can do this by following this tutorial:
http://ds106.us/wiki/index.php?title=Updating_your_ds106_directory_profile
2) Syndicating Posts into ds106 Site

The following link leads to a list of blogs that have been added to the ds106 blogroll, but have not yet been syndicated into the ds106 site. The possible reasons that they have not been syndicated yet are either because there is not yet a ds106 specific post, or the tag you will be using for your ds106 posts has not yet been specified. If you haven’t yet, take a moment to look at the list and see if your blog url is listed. If it is, create a test post for ds106 on your blog with the appropriate tag, and then note you’ve done this next to your blog URL on the wiki page—and please include the tag you are using.

http://ds106.us/wiki/index.php?title=DS106_Blogs_Not_Syndicating#List_of_ds106_blogs_added_to_blogroll_but_not_yet_syndicated

If you do not see your blog in the blogroll on the front page of ds106.us, then chances are you have not added your blog URL using the form in the sidebar on the front page of ds106. If you can, take a moment and do that now so that your posts can be syndicated into the ds106.us blog.

3) Subscribing to ds106

Finally, you have a couple of options for subscribing to the ds106 posts.

a) You can simply subscribe to the ds106.us blog RSS feed, which will give you a ready made OPML bundle of all the blogs being syndicated. The blog feed will immediately link you back to the actual blog post, not the ds106.us site, which makes it convenient. What’s more, given we are filtering by tag in most cases, you will only see those posts that are ds106 relevant.

b) You can also opt for a ds106 daily digest sent to you via email.  You need to be registered on the ds106.us site for this option to work, and after that you just opt-in. To do this, follow the brief instructions here:

http://ds106.us/wiki/index.php?title=The_ds106_Daily_Digest_Email

OK, that’s it for now, and sometime in the next two or three days there will be another email with specific information about the course. Specifically, a rough syllabus and calendar, some approaches to assignments, tech details for setting up your own site (stop being a digital sharecropper!), and some more formal introductions.

So until then, stay beautiful.

Jim