Welcome to the latest entry into my Tips & Tricks series! In this brief post, I’ll quickly run through another new-to-us feature, “Following”. This will allow you to track and follow the content of people and content you like throughout the website.

Essentially, there are three aspects to following what you enjoy on the site: following categories, following content, and following individuals. I’ll run through each aspect and how each can be useful to you and improve how you find your favorite content.

Following Individuals
There are probably some contributors and forum users you like better than the rest, individuals whose content you know is going to be quality so you don’t want to miss it. Following a person is easy, just click on their username or avatar and visit their profile page. Near the top of the page, you will see a “Follow Member” button. Click that, specify the parameters of your follow and whether you’d like to follow anonymously, and that’s it! You will now be notified whenever this user creates new content anywhere on the site!

NOTE: You should set your notification settings to specify how you’d like to receive information about new and updated content. You can change your notification settings from your user options screen or by clicking the link earlier in this paragraph. Scroll down to the “Followed Content” option and selecting your settings.

Following Categories
You can follow groups of content, as well. Are you a LINK LINK minor league specialist? Then consider following the minor league news category. Maybe you want to catch all LINK LINK Major League news content, you can do the same. Just visit the category or forum page and somewhere near the top of the page, you will see a “Follow” button. Click that, specify your preferred options, and you will be notified of all content that is added to that category or forum. This also works for blogs if you want to follow the blog entries of your favorite writers, just pop over to their main blog page and search for the “Follow” button.

Following Content
This is the most granular of the following options. You can follow specific content you see on the site. If you like an article and its resulting comments, follow that article and you will be updated as new comments are added. The same applies to forum threads or individual blog entries, just look for the “Follow” button near the top of the page.

In the settings link I provided above, you can set to automatically follow content you create and content you participate in. If you’re a regular forum user or news story commenter, these are really useful functions to stay abreast of an interesting conversation and any replies you received to your own content.

That’s about it! I highly recommend everyone consider using the follow function, as it’s just one more tool at your disposal to curate the site to fit your personal preferences.