Sometimes people need a liitle help to do things. Here are some notes for you to show you how to do different things on our site.
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It's easy to autosubscribe to content that you post. Like many things on this site, it is done through your "My Account" area. Here are the steps to follow:
1) Click on "My Account"
2) Click on "Edit my Profile"
3) Click on "Immediate notifications settings"
4) Tick the box beside "autosubscribe"
* You can also set preferences here for how often you want to get notified - immediately, once a day, once a week, etc.
5) Scroll to the end of the page to save your changes.
When creating a message, there is an area just under where you put in your message text called "Add Images".
Clicking the button here labelled "Choose File" will let you select your image.
Once selected, simply click on "Upload" and your image will be uploaded for you.
You have a number of options of what size you want the image. Here are sample sizes for you:
(the sizes with "lightbox" beside them when choosing your size mean that if you click on those images they will open up big on your screen)
After you upload your image and choose your size, you MUST then click on insert to "insert" the image in your message.
You can now "drag and drop" your image where you want it on the page. If you want your text on the left or right of the image, click on the image to select it, then on the image icon 
in the tool bar; now, under "alignment" at the bottom of the pop-up window, choose "left" or "right" and click OK.
It's very easy to change your password.
You first need to go to your "My Account" page.
Under "Account Settings", click on "Edit my Profile".
Next, choose the "Change Password" tab.
Input your new password.
Click "Change Password" at the bottom. - Yippee! A new password, just for you!
(You can also use this page to change your personal and professional information as well, by choosing the "Personal Information" or "Work Information" tabs instead of the "Change Password" one.)
To create an account on Ireland Reaching Out, you need to click on the "Login/Register" button in the main menu bar.
Next you need to click on the "Join Ireland Reaching Out" button.
This will bring you to a page to enter you signup details - name, email address etc. When you have filled in these details, click the "Join Ireland Reaching Out" button at the bottom of the page.
Presuming you have filled out this form correctly, you will be sent an email with details of your account. When you receive this email, there is a long link in it that you need to click on to verify that you are the person that owns the email (it lets us know that you were not setting up a fake account for someone else).
The link that you click here is a "one time login" link. After you click on it and login to you account, you must now change you password. (Don't forget to click the "Change Password" button at the bottom.)
You now have a fully functioning Ireland Reaching Out account. Congratulations and thanks for joining us!
There are a number of ways to find your parish using our website.
1) You can do a search using our search box.
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2) You can click on "Parishes" in the main menu to get a list of all parishes in Ireland.
- You can use the "Parish Search" box on this page to filter parishes name.
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3) You can navigate to a county page from the main menu and see all parishes in that county.
- You can use the "Parish Search" box on these county pages to filter parishes name.
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4) You can use the "Active Ireland XO Parishes" map on the right hand sidebar.
If you wish to receive an email everytime someone creates a message in one of your parishes, you need to follow these simple steps. You can do the same to subscribe to any type of content in a parish ("Local News", for example).
1) Login to your account. On your "My Account" page (the first page you arrive on when you login), click on "Notificiation Settings" under "Account Settings".
2) You will be brought to your "Notifications" page. Here you can subscribe (and/or unsubscribe) from content on our site. To add a new subscription, click on the "Add Subscription" tab at the top.
3) Next, you are presented with a list of subscription types. To choose all messages in one of your parishes, click on "Content type in group".
4) Lastly, choose the parish whose content you want to subscribe to (the list will only show parishes that you are a member of), then choose which content type you wish to subscribe to (probably "Message"), and then click "Add".
This is very simple. To make sure that you receive an email when someone replies to your message, you need to follow two steps:
1) Click the "Subscriptions" link below the image upload area:
2) Tick the box beside "This post" to subscribe to your post:
If you don't do this, and you wish to subscribe to your message later (or any message for that matter), simply click on the "Subscribe to this Post" link under the message you wish to subscribe to:
To post content on Ireland XO, you first must have an account. You can register for one here.
Once you have an account, you must be logged in to the site to post content.
To post a message on a message board, you must "Join" that parish first, by clicking on the "JOIN PARISH" link that is on the parish homepage (we call parish homepages VPPs - "Virtual Parish Presences").
Now, when you are on the VPP of a parish that you are a member of, you will see a new box on the top of the right sidebar labelled "Post a Message". Clicking on the "Create" button here will bring you to the "Post a Message" page for this parish.
Lastly, fill in your title, ancestors' surnames, your query, and then scroll down to the bottom to click "Post".
Anatomy of a VPPThe Ireland Reaching Out website is a very rich source of information, with a lot of different sections. We are constantly making efforts to ensure that the site is easy to navigate.
The most important feature of our site is our parish profiles, or VPPs. It is here that the “action” of the site happens, and any features we create for the site simply pull information from VPPs and display it in different manners. The “Message Board” is an example of this – people post messages to individual parish pages and then we extract those posts and compile them to make the “global” message board.
A VPP is a “Virtual Parish Presence” – it is your parish’s presence in a virtual world. Quite simply, it is a website within a website.
On your VPP’s menu, there are a number of tabs, each with its own function. Let’s look at each in turn.
As the name suggests, the “News” tab displays the latest news from your parish. The news page shows the last five news posts, starting with the most recent one. This pages shows only the title of the news posting, when it was posted, and by whom.
To read any of these news posts, simply click on the title of that post.
The “Events” tab lists all upcoming events in your parish. They are listed with the next upcoming event at the top of the list.
Clicking on any event title on this page will bring you to a full page listing of that particular event, including a Google Map showing where the event is taking place (presuming the person who created the event noticed used this feature).
You can see a list of your parish’s past events in the left sidebar on this page.
The message board is arguably the most important part of your VPP. It’s your link with your diaspora, the area that people will use to connect with you and that you can use to connect with others.
The difference between this “local” message board and the “global” message board is that all the messages here relate to your parish. The “global” message board shows messages from all parishes.
Here users can read (and reply) to all your parish’s messages. They can also filter messages by surname and use search phrases to find specific things in message posts.
We take the information from about 2,500 parish message boards on our site to create the “global” message board.
As a parish admin, you should keep a very close eye on this page and try to answer any questions that are posted. Even a short reply can be very encouraging to receive, something like: “Thanks a lot for your message. I am going to bring it to the attention of the rest of the Ireland XO group here in [place name] and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can”. This lets people know that you are available to help them and that you will do as much as you can for them.
This is a “holding area” for most parishes at the moment and does not contain specific information. When fully developed, we will host a lot of documents and information related to Irish genealogy, with each item “housed” in its own parish. Items that could be housed here include things such as letters home from emigrants, school roll records if your local school allows you to have access to them, Griffith’s Valuation for your parish, etc. (If you have any ideas for materials that could end up in this online museum, please let us know about them.)
We want every parish to write out its history. Using the power of the Internet, you could make this a very interactive feature with photos, videos, tweets, links, maps, and audio – anything you can imagine.
The best way to use this section is to create a new “History Page” for each item that you wish to discuss. So, for example, one about “[Townland Name] and the famine”, one about “Battle of [Townland Name] 1798”, and so on. This will then build up a very generous bank of information about every parish in the country and become a very vibrant reference source for many people, from primary school students to university professors.
This is somewhat similar to the “History” section, but should be used to discuss places only – the history section could discuss people and places. Also, “places of interest” may not necessarily be places of historical significance.
What we would like to see under this tab is things such as information about, for example, your town square, your GAA grounds, your graveyards (you could even “map” every grave with Google Maps and an image of all the inscriptions), the parochial house, etc.
Every parish is made up of townlands. Ireland Reaching Out seeks to create a page on our site for every townland in the country – about 125,000 pages. On these pages, you can have information about the townland historically, with maps/images of the houses, people, fields, rivers, lakes concerned. You could also have a link on every townland page to that townland’s 1901 and 1911 Census, its Griffith’s Valuation, and any other historical documents of note.
As a starting point, it is sufficient to simply create a page for each townland, filling in only the “Title” field. This will be very helpful for people who are researching their ancestors and know that they come from a certain townland, but do not know what parish that townland is in. As an extension of this, this will be very helpful for search engine rankings for your parish VPP.
Every parish in Ireland is photogenic. We want you to show off your parish to the world; let everyone see how beautiful Ireland is.
When creating galleries, create one gallery for each item you wish to show off; one for (as examples):
Presuming you are going to use the site to invite your diaspora home, you will need to let them know that your parish has facilities for them. Use this section to create a list of these facilities, such as (for example):
Basically, this section could become like a mini business directory for your town.
Just like every parish in the country, there are a lot of clubs and groups to join in your parish. Use this section to create a page for each of them. The club/group can give you information about when they meet/train, where they meet, if there are any fees, if they accept new members, etc.
The full PARISH ADMIN handbook is HERE.
To edit/add information on your VPP Homepage, click the “Edit” button on your VPP Menu Bar. You must be logged in with Parish Admin status to see this edit button.
Please leave the “Name” field at the setting we have it – it allows us to keep uniformity on parish names and is also optimized for search engines.
Add a short description of your parish in the “Description” field. Max 150 characters – if it can’t fit in a text message, it can’t fit in here!
To add your main parish image, you use the “Main Parish Image” upload feature
Most of your parish information will be inputted in the “Mission Statement” area. When finished adding information, make sure to scroll to the end of the page to click “Save/Post”.
To add extra images to your VPP (like above), please see the post “How do I add images to my posts?” – it’s the exact same procedure.
To add your parish location (we will be building interactive maps at a later stage and this is where we will take the map locations from), you simply need to put your parish name in the “city” field and then your county name in the “State/province” field.
Please leave this area with the default settings.
In this area, you can input some extra information about your parish, such as alternative names for your parish – eg. Portlaoise could also be called Maryborough for the purposes of older censuses. This means that if someone does a search for “Maryborough” Portlaoise will show up in the results page.
You can also input parish populations from 1841 and the present day.
You can add some links that are relevant to your parish – a Wikipedia entry for example, and these will all get appended to the bottom of your VPP.
It is of utmost importance that you save your information after you make changes to it. If you do not save your work, it will not be there the next time you go to your VPP.
The full PARISH ADMIN handbook is HERE.
Creating “History Page” posts is almost identical to creating “Latest News” posts. The only exception is that you can also add a marker to a map so that people can find exactly the spot that you are talking about.
From the content selector, choose “History Page” and then click “Create”.
Give your page a title – make it relevant. Do not use a title like “Our First History Post”; use something like “A Brief History of Bunratty Castle, Co. Clare”.
To add your “History Page” to our maps, simply click your mouse where you want your pointer to be. If you are not happy with where the pin drops, you can “drag and drop” it using the left mouse button.
The co-ordinates are added (and changed) automatically. You can change them manually if you know the exact Google Maps co-ordinates for the place you are talking about.
Again, as always, do not forget to save your work.
The full PARISH ADMIN handbook is HERE.
We would like every parish to add local news to their VPPs on a regular basis. One very simple way of doing this would be to get a copy of your parish newsletter (if your parish has one) and simply upload this once a week – it should take no more than 3-5 minutes to do this!
To create a “Local News” post, go to your VPP. In the “Content Type Selector” area, click on the dropdown menu and choose the type of content you wish to create. In this case, it’s “Local News”.
Once you have chosen the type of content you wish to create, click “Create”.
Give your post a title – make sure it is relevant to your post, such as “Ballyhoura Weekly News March 10th 2012”
You can add a “Main Image” that will show up on the list of local news posts if you click the “News” tab on your VPP, along with the first paragraph of news. This image is set to automatically “float” to the left of your text.
To do so, simply click on the “Choose File” box, choose the file you wish to add, then click “Upload”. If you wish you can add a title and description for your image. This is good for search engines.
Next, you can input your main news content in the "Body" area.
If you are copying/pasting your information from a Microsoft Word file, please use the “Paste from Word” icon in the toolbar. (It is advisable to use this feature when copying/pasting any information on our website.)
If you wish to add extra images to your post, use the “Add Images” area below the input area. For detailed instructions on how to add images, please see “How do I add images to my posts?”
You can also use this area to upload a file with your post (for example, the original Word document that your news was taken from).
As always, don’t forget to save your post to make it “go live” on our website. This will automatically add it to your “News” tab and the “News” tab on the main menu.
The full PARISH ADMIN handbook is HERE.
Creating event notices is quite similar to creating other pages, except that we also need to add the event information so that your event gets added our event calendar.
Like before, choose “Event” from the “Content Type Selector”. Then click “Create”.
Give your event a title. Make sure it is relevant to your event, such as “Week of Welcomes Grand Opening Gala” rather than “Our Great Event” – this helps your readers to know what events are coming up and is also much better for search engines.
You can also add an image here if you wish.
Next, you can put in a description about your event – what is it, who is performing, do you have a link to a website that you’d like to post, are there any images that will help “sell” your event?
The next part is to add our event details.
When you click inside the date field a calendar automatically pops up. Simply choose the date of the event here. Beside the date, you put in the time of the event in 24 hour format.
We now come to an optional part where you can put in the location of the event. There are two sections to this. We strongly advise that you use the first one if not both of them.
The first one is a simply text space to type in the location of the event – this will get added under a “Location” heading on your event page.
The second is Google Maps based. You only need left click your mouse where the event is and that will automatically add it to our interactive maps. You can zoom in to the map to see if you have dropped it in the correct place. If not, simply “drag and drop” it in to position. Latitude and Longitude are automatically created for you (or you can enter your own).
If you wish to add extra images to your event notice, you can use the “Add Images” area. The process of adding images is explained in detail in the section “How do I add images to my posts?”
Save. Don’t forget to save your event so that it will add itself to your “Events” tab on your VPP menu, and also to the “global” events tab on the site’s main menu. This will also add it to the event calendar and allow us to build our interactive maps.
The full PARISH ADMIN handbook is HERE.
When creating a message, there is an area just under where you put in your message text called "Add Images".
Clicking the button here labelled "Choose File" will let you select your image.
Once selected, simply click on "Upload" and your image will be uploaded for you.
You have a number of options of what size you want the image. Here are sample sizes for you:
(the sizes with "lightbox" beside them when choosing your size mean that if you click on those images they will open up big on your screen)
After you upload your image and choose your size, you MUST then click on insert to "insert" the image in your message.
You can now "drag and drop" your image where you want it on the page. If you want your text on the left or right of the image, click on the image to select it, then on the image icon in the tool bar; now, under "alignment" at the bottom of the pop-up window, choose "left" or "right" and click OK.
The full PARISH ADMIN handbook is HERE.
There are two steps to creating image galleries. One is to create the gallery and the other is to add images to the gallery. Both steps are quite easy to do.
Choose “Gallery” as your content type (image in this list is ONLY for adding images to galleries that already exist). Then click create.
Give your Gallery a title – make sure it is relevant to the images that are going to be in the gallery. Use a title like “Rock of Cashel”, rather than “Our Gallery”.
Choose an image that is going to be the “cover” image for your gallery. This is the image that people will click on to open up the rest of the images in the gallery. Click upload once you have chosen this image.
Now, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Save/Post”. You gallery has now been created BUT there are no images in it just yet.
To start adding images to the Gallery, click on the ADD PHOTOS TO YOUR GALLERY link.
First you need to click on the “Add Images” button. Make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Flash Player installed or you won’t be able to see this button.
Select all of the images that you want to add to your gallery. Then click “Open”.
This will add the selected images to a queue to be uploaded. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Save” to uploaded your images.
Once the images are uploaded, you can click on “Next Step” to add captions to your images.
On this page, you can give each image a “Title” and a “Description”. The title is the name of the page that the image will be stored on. The description is what will show up as the caption when you click on the image in a gallery.
When you have given each image a title and description, you can then click the “Done Editing” button at the bottom of the page.
Your gallery has now been created, and images have been added to it. At a later date, if you wish to add more images to this gallery, you can click on the ADD IMAGES TO GALLERY link again to repeat the above process.
The full PARISH ADMIN handbook is HERE.
(in three short minutes)
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