We realize a majority of you use the site solely for the classified ads, but we hope you see there there is so much more you can do here. We encourage you to add photos & music to your profile, start a blog, discuss Nunavut topics in the forum, add a recipe, play some games and much more! Take a look around and see what there is to do. If you have a business, we would certainly appreciate your support by creating a business listing or a purchasing a banner advertisement.

Changes and New Features

We've had more time this month that we thought we would, and have added some more new features above and beyond the changes announced in the last blog post earlier this month. Most noticeable will be the Recipe section. Keep in mind that this is a work in progress, and although it is ready for our members to start sharing their recipes there could be a few problems. We intend to specialize in made-in-Nunavut Northern recipes, but we are configured to support anything and everything. Please add your favourite recipe amd include a picture of a dish you made. Let us know in the forum if you have any problems, and feel free to leave ratings and comments for the other recipes if you try them out.

Next, the forums themselves have been altered to integrate better with your profile. Now every post you make will include your favourite quote, an icon indicating your gender and another for your location. The other changes are mostly technical and administrative and you probably won't notice. We know people don't use the forum much and would certainly appreciate it if you started discussions on topics regarding NunavutOnline or anything else happening in Nunavut.

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I'm sure all of you have noticed quite a few changes recently, the purpose of which is to make the site a bit more community friendly. The most noticeable change is that the template, which controls the look of the site, has been given a complete overhaul. We think it is a visual improvement and hope you agree. Other things we added recently:

Rate Profiles

On everyone's profile under the portrait is a five star rating system. If you really like the content someone added to their profile, rate it as five stars. If you dislike someone's profile or want to send them a message that they should add more details, rate them lower.

As most of you have noticed there have been a lot of changes at NunavutOnline. Most importantly, we have re-organized ourselves to be much more of a social networking service similar to sites such as Facebook, Bebo and Myspace. Are we as advanced as these sites? No, but try to keep in mind that they have budgets ranging in the millions of dollars with dozens of developers while we are trying to run this place with 1 developer, a webmaster and a couple hundred dollars.

So what is a social network service? From Wikipedia: "social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services."

One of the most important features of today's online social networks is the ability to maintain a personal profile. At NunavutOnline this allows you to share information about yourself including personal details, pictures, who you are connected (friends) with and your interests. Your profile is also a central place to show your activity around the site such as forum posts you have made, high scored received in games, videos you have posted, events you have created and awards received.

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For our second blog post, we would like to introduce an awards system we are developing at NunavutOnline. Put simply, we will be providing awards in the form of virtual Trophies or Medals to members who participate, contribute and excel in the various sections NunavutOnline. These awards will be visible in your member profile and show you to be an important member of our growing community.

The first set of awards to be handed out will very likely be some of the most treasured because of how unique they will be. They will only be provided once for each section of our site and many years from now will serve as proof that you were with us from the beginning as an initial contributor. We can't promise anything now, but if we become as popular as we hope, we will be happy to provide you the credit due for helping to get us started.

The areas that these inaugural awards will be provided for are Profile Pictures, Forum Posts, Blog Entries, Arcade High Scores, Events and there may be one or two more. How can you receive one of these awards? Easy; just use the site and contribute in each section as much as you can. When someone wins an award, we will announce it along with a reason why they won the award for that section. Except for a rare circumstance that would include exceptional contribution is more that one section, we hope to limit the awards to one per person.

To give an idea on how this will work, the first person to add 10 events, or if  no one has added 10 by December 31 the person with the most events (at least 5) will receive the award. For the blog section, the first person to add 5 good quality Blog posts will win this award. Only posts created at least 5 days apart will count. The other sections have on similar type of rules, some if it at my descretion.

In addition to these "Initail Contributor" awards, we will also be running a Tournament for a game in the arcade. The winner will get a Tournament trophy that is different from the ones awarded to initial contributors. You can help us choose which game to use for the Tournament by voting in the poll in the "Online Community" section.

To graphics used for the trophies are above, in this blog. To see how they will be displayed in your profile, visit my (Admin) profile and click the "Awards" tab at the bottom of the page. I received an award for all of work putting this site together. Now get out there and contribute!

Your NunavutOnline Administrator.

Hello everyone and welcome to NunavutOnline.Com; the premier community portal to bring Nunavumiut, and those interested in Nunavut, together. We had originally created IqaluitOnline.Com in 2003, since that was the community that the creators lived in, but after much thought and popular demand it only makes sense include all of Nunavut.

So what is a community portal? In it's simplest form, it's a website intended to allow a community, residents & visitors, to share information about their community with each other. With the popularity of social network sites such as Bebo and Facebook, a good community portal should also allow everyone to share information about themselves.

NunavutOnline plans to bring these together in a unique and exiting way which we believe everyone will will find very effective. Our Profile section will allow people to share pictures, videos, hobbies as well as summarize information they have posted in other areas of the site. Everyone will also be able to have their own blog, have threaded discussions in the forum and share recipes with that unique northern touch.