Our new website is now in beta mode to present and test some of its features. 

Transfer of accounts - at the top of the page there is a sign in /sign up link. If you click on "sign up" you'll have the option of transferring your account. This does nothing to change or deactivate your account on the current site. It allows us to bring over active accounts including Gravatars. 

The only features from the current site which have been enabled on the beta site are articles and events. Articles will be posted on both the old and new sites so that you can compare them.

We have been testing the use of Disqus as the commenting tool and there are still modifications and integration for final implementation.  We are aware there are issues with avatars in the comments and are working with Disqus to resolve them. 

You can also sign on to the new RDF.net via Facebook and Twitter. You can use and comment using Disqus, however the "real" conversations will be on the main site for the time being. Comments on the beta site are for testing only and my be lost during final conversion. We want to work through any issues with articles and events before completing the integration of the commenting.>Events is now integrated with Google Maps and you can export to your local calendar - notice the "Export to iCal" option.

Readers can add events from the menu.  When you add an event it goes into an approval queue and a member of RDF's staff will review and approve before posting.   The "approval" is mainly to make sure that address and other event information is complete and is formatted correctly; and to determine that the event is appropriate for the site (a  set of guidelines will be released shortly). This will allow users from around the world to add events not only of national or worldwide interest, but for their local area as well.  We'll be adding filters and more sorting options but the the default for the Google Map right now will be your address as determined from your current IP address. You can also search for events in different cities; for example, typing "London" in the search box will show those events in London.

There is a "feedback" button at the lower left of the screen please use that to provide feedback to us as the e-mail distributes to all of us on the tech team and you can also discuss the various features or problems with others.

More to come
Articles: currently readers send an e-mail to us and we select a few for posting.  Readers will soon be able to enter a url directly into a form, the system will parse the article and create the necessary elements based on html specific to each source, BBC, ScienceDaily, Scientific American, etc. These articles will then be sent to an approval queue and the moderators can look through them, make any tweaks as necessary and then with a single click those will be posted to the site.  It will also automatically include a link to your username on RDF - or anonymous if you prefer.
 
Books: currently the books page is just a single very large manually maintained page.  This is being reformatted into a database so that books and articles of interest can easily be found. As are the cases with events and articles, readers will be able to submit books to the approval queue and those can then be added to the database. We'll have staff selections, reader selections and other methods of filtering and organizing.
 
Corner pages: there will be pages for each of the key people in the organization. Richard, Sean, Elisabeth, and Andy that will include articles written by them, their speaking calendar, books they are reading or recommend and other information. 
 
User profiles - These will be greatly expanded. For example you can add your location so that the information you look for on the calendar events will be more personalized.  Each field other than your username will be optionally viewable with the default setting being private and you will modify your profile if you want to share your location, reading recommendations and any other personal info.
 
. . .and much more

We hope you will take time to go through the beta site and provide feedback. Our goal is to expand RDnet and reach more people as well as keep you coming back to our site.