Help

• What do I need to do to sign up to Little Legends?

  From our sign up, just provide us with your chosen username, your email address, and a password. Once you've registered, we'll send an email to the address you provided. This email will contain an activation link. Clicking on the link included will activate your account and complete the registration process.

• Why hasn't my account been activated?

  There's a fair chance that our confirmation email is probably sitting in your spam or junk folder right now. If can't find it, then we'll gladly activate your account for you.

  Please follow these directions carefully: Send us an email to support@littlelegends.biz from the email address from which you attempted to register. For your security, we won't be able to confirm that you are who you say you are unless you send an email from this account. (Sorry for any inconvenience that might cause). In the subject line, please write: "Activation" along with your sign up email address.

• How do I change my password?

  To change your old password, you can change it by going to your page, and clicking on edit details.

• I forgot my password

  Please click here to be resent it.

  You can also reach this page from the signing in page

User Pages

• How do I add a picture of me?

  First, you need to log in and navigate to your page. From there, click on the "edit details" button. This takes you to the edit screen.

  In the About you section, you will see an option to add your picture. Browse to find the mugshot or image you want - and then save the changes to your profile.

• My picture's all skewed or cropped wrongly

  We automatically resize and crop the pictures you upload so that they become images that are 100 pixels wide by 100 pixels high.

  To avoid skewing and poor cropping, you could resize the pictures yourself before you upload them. That way, we can make sure that we show the images you upload exactly as you want them to be shown.

• Why don't I have any neighbours?

  For us to show who's signed up near you, we need to know your postcode. If you're worried about privacy, this doesn't have to be your full postcode. You can, for example, edit your details and add AB1 rather than AB1 C2D. Adding your full postcode will give a more accurate idea of how close people are to you. We'll never show it in full though, just the first part (e.g. AB1).

  That said, you may be the first person in your area to sign up. If that's the case, you could always ask a friend to sign up :)

Adding & Editing places

• How can I add a place?

  Anyone who is registered can add a place. To add a place, the steps are as follows:

  1. Log in and navigate to your own page (using the top menu bar)

  2. Click on the Add a place link in the top right side panel under Share what you know

  3. This will take you to a form where you can add details of the place you want to share, including address, website, pictures, and any other notes you think people should know about

  4. Submit the place by clicking the "Share it" button at the bottom of the form

  That's it. You should now be taken to the place you've just added

Maps

• Why aren't the flags in the right place?

  In short, because we can't afford to. The Royal Mail owns the copyright for postcodes, and so their exact geographical locations. It's expensive for us to license this information (a few thousand pounds per year), and unfortunately our pockets are not that deep.

  What we do instead is use a free service from Nearby.org.uk that helps us map your places, albeit a little less accurately.

  We're actively looking at ways to improve the accuracy, but hopefully this is enough of a start to let you know what's in your area.

  [p.s. there are various community initiatives to "free the postcode", more information on which can be found in this Guardian article.]

• I've added a place but it's not showing up on the map

  Please first double check that you've entered a postcode. We can only put your place on the map if you know the postcode. If you don't know the full postcode, try the shorter version. (That way at least others will still see it if they search for what's nearby.)

  Second, for the reasons mentioned in the answer above, we cannot currently plot your place with 100% accuracy. As a result, the flag may be there, just not quite where you're looking for it. Check the list on the right hand side of the map page, and you should be able to see where we've plotted it.

Tags & Bookmarks

• What are tags?

  Tags are just words or groups of words you choose to help you find things again.

  For example, let's say you stumble across a great day out in London for your nephew Christopher Robin. You might bookmark Buckingham Palace on LittleLegends, and then "tag" your bookmark London day_out ChristopherR.

  That done, you forget all about it, until Christopher Robin's mum asks you to look after him one weekend. By quickly looking back at the bookmarks you've tagged with London, day_out, and ChristopherR, Buckingham Palace will show up as a possibility. Then all you have to do is worry about where to take him for tea.

RSS

• What is RSS?

  RSS takes the hassle out of staying up-to-date, by showing you the very latest information that you are interested in.

  It allows you to see when sites from all over the internet have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and articles (or even audio files, photographs or video) in one place, as soon as they are published, without having to remember to visit each site every day.

  Sometimes, with email newsletters, you can subscribe and then find it hard to unsubscribe. Or the information you want is somewhere hidden in a long newsletter, the rest of which you don't need. RSS helps you avoid these, by putting you in control of the subscription process and "chunking" the information in a way that's much easier to skim

  There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but most people plump for 'Really Simple Syndication'. RSS feeds are just a special kind of web page, designed to be read by computers rather than people. It might help to think of them as the free, internet version of the old-fashioned ticker-tape news wire machines.

  Not all websites currently provide RSS, but it is growing rapidly in popularity and many others, including the Guardian, New York Times and CNN provide it.

  And here at littl'old Little Legends we provide it too.

  You can subscribe to comments people are making about a place, other people's bookmarks, who's nearby, and search results. All of which means it's easier for you to keep abreast of what's going on near you.

• How can I use RSS?

  In general, the first thing you need is something called a news reader. This is a piece of software that checks RSS feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added to them. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications. Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer, in the same way that you either download your e-mail using Outlook, or keep it on a web-based service like Hotmail.

  Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want to receive in your news reader, by finding and subscribing to the relevant RSS feeds.

  Let's say you wanted to keep track of what's being said about a local school, you will notice an orange RSS button by under the comments.

  If you click on the button you can subscribe to the feed in various ways, including by dragging the URL of the RSS feed into your news reader or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your news reader. (Most sites that offer RSS feeds use a similar orange RSS button, but some may just have a normal web link to the feed.)

  Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, automatically check for RSS feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one. This can make subscribing to RSS feeds much easier. For more details on these, please check their websites.

• How do I get a news reader?

  There is a range of different news readers available and new versions are appearing all the time.

  Different news readers work on different operating systems, so you will need to choose one that will work with your computer.

  Below is a list of news readers that the BBC recommends. There are more, but these are good start point.

  Windows

  • Newz Crawler
  • FeedDemon
  • Awasu

  Mac OS X

  • Newsfire
  • NetNewsWire

  Web

  • Bloglines
  • My Yahoo!
  • NewsGator

  Browser

  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Opera
  • Safari
• Can I use these feeds on my site?

  Feel free to!

  If you run your own website, you can use RSS feeds to display the latest headlines from other websites on your site.

  We encourage the free use of our feeds as part of a website, but please note that these have to be subject to our Terms and Conditions.

  If you do use one of our feeds, though, some attribution would be appreciated. Something like "From LittleLegends.biz" or "thanks to LittleLegends.biz" would be great.

  And again, please note that Little Legends does not accept any liability for its RSS feeds.