Spacehey is great but if you're new to the old web it can be a bit confusing and the About and Help sections aren't very helpful, so Im making this blog post to hopefully help out any new users who come across this! You'll find an explanation of everything you can do on spacehey and some resources/tips to getting started with your profile.  

If you have any questions feel free to IM me or say something in the comments and I'll do my best to help/clarify:-]  This post is geared towards people who are new to spacehey and the old web in general, if you're familiar with the old web feel free to read to get a general vibe of what you can do :p  I already made a post like this in the past but it wasn't as detailed so I'm making a new one this post covers everything I can think of lol.  I will be updating and maintaining this post, so if i left something out lmk in the comments and ill add it B-]]]  Or just feel free to add your own advice to new people in the comments

First of all:What you're going to get out of spacehey.

Spacehey isn't going to be your typical social media experience there are no algorithms picking specific posts for you, no infinite scroll of posts ( though there certainly are a lot of blog posts to find! ) and a overall slower paced experience.  You're not going to get thousands of kudos and crazy comments on your blog entries and shouldn't expect to.  While there is a page for "top posts" the algorithm there is flawed and not based on comments/kudos. What you'll find is that spacehey is more of a curated experience meaning you're going to have to hunt for the posts blogs and the people you want to see and interact with.  Spacehey is community driven and if you wait for people to come to you instead of going out to other people you're not going to have any fun ( or maybe you will and you prefer to just have a profile to customize and a private diary, and in that case i suggest you make your own website which can essentially be the same thing but COMPLETELY customizable!!)

What can you do here?

Spacehey is super fun when you're getting involved!  You can customize your profile with HTML and CSS, you can make blog posts and customize them too, join groups and chat with them in group bulletins and forums, check out the official spachey forums and make private bulletins for you and the people you have friended to check out(orrr for you and the people of the group youre in to see) 

Blogs

The main thing on spacehey though is the blogs, they can be very fun.  When you make a blog you choose a category and what kind of post it will be and other people will see it when they click in those catagories or look at recent blogs(if its recent enough ofc).

You can make diary entries, which are just private posts only you can see, a post that only your friends can see, a post that only people on your favorites list can see, a post where only people with a link to your blog entry can see and finally a regular public post that everyone can see anywhere!  Some examples on how you can utilize this system is maybe you run a blog about fashion you like but you also want to make posts about what you're up to/what you did that day or whatever, well you could make all your posts about fashion public and posts that are unrelated friends only.  Another alternative is creating a separate account dedicated to a topic or just more formal blog posts and another for personal stuff(something i did when i was really into marble hornets! going to rework that account into something else soon maybe ;-])  Theres so many options!!

You can also subscribe to other peoples blogs if you find one you like all you have to do is click on "view blog" in their posts and click subscribe.  If you have an rss reader theres also an option to add it to your rss feed in the top right corner but if you have a rss reader im sure you know how to subscribe to something( if you dont know what an rss reader is check it ouuutttt its really useful but beyond the scope of this post and tbh my knowledge as well i need to get one soon)

Bulletins

When I first joined bulletins confused me, I wasn't exactly sure what they were but theyre actually pretty simple.  Theyre essentially mini blog posts, minus the catagories, that expire after a certain ammount of time.  The max time they can stay up is ten days and go down to five then one.  Theyre great for talking about current things that are going on or sparking quick conversations.  You can post private ones that stay between you and your friends or you can post more public ones in groups where anyone inside that group can reply.

Forums

Forums also confused me.  They work like this, there are main catagories on the forum page and you can open a topic in them.  Anybody can comment on this topic(unless you disable them).  The thing is that you can't reply to users directly like you can in blog comments.  You can see people going -->[username] 'sometimes what that person theyre responding to said to be specific' then their message.  If you want to keep up with the conversatin you'll have to check in pretty often as you wont get notified when people respond to your topic.  I personally don't use them that often but they can be fun :p

Groups

In my opinion if blogs is spacehey's number one thing groups gotta be the third because customization would be second, but hey third is still pretty good.  There are groups on spacehey you can join that are dedicated to topics.  Inside these groups you can find a brief description of the group, the groups bulletins, and the groups forums.  This is where I typically talk to the most users, normally through bulletins!  Anybody can make their own group as well.  If you're looking for a group to join I recommend this one, I like it a lot and its how I got into the old web movement and its pretty active :p

Customization

This is the one everybody was probably waiting for, you can customize your layouts and blog posts with HTML and CSS.  Honestly its really fun but if you're not wanting to learn HTML you can always go to the layouts tab and check out some stuff from there, no shame in frankeinsteining something together(half the time its the gateway into learning HTML/CSS).  Buuuuut if you do want to learn HTML then heres how i did(and currently am still doing) it!

When I first started out I used a layout I found online and a website that gave you the basics of HTML and a bit of CSS and just played around with it.  The site I used (which DW ill link in my resources seciton) would tell me, for example, how to place images so then I'd immediately go to my profile and test it out.  This really helped me understand what i was doing and build memory.  In the beginning I used a mix of other peoples code and mixing and mashing mine.  If you're curious I did post my first layout, you should be able to find in my profile in the layouts link.  I also started my own website which helped me learn some more complicated stuff which translated to spacehey.  The best way you're going to learn is with projects so get your hands dirty and mess with stuff!  Even if its just editing the font you're using or changing text to bold, no shame in starting small its what everybody else did!  A good tip I've been using lately that you might want to use once you start getting more familiar with HTML is inspecting your profile or others profiles to see how certain elements are made and how you can edit them ( i used this to learn how to organize a page layout which i implemented into my website B-])

Resources

These are just some useful links that i used for my profile and other stuff, itll probably be updated as i find more stuff :-]

Profile

-HTML

W3Schools - Where I learned the basics of HTML and some CSS

Profile Preview - Insert your code into the respective sections and you can see your profile update in real time

Change Various Text/Titles - good tutorial on what it says

-Decoration

Graphics Archives - graphics site, therell be a few of these

Hoarders Pile - Buttons blinkies stamps

Dividers - some cool dividers

Conclusion

Spacehey is a community site that you're going to have to curate your own experience for, go out and look at profiles add some people and get talking!  Join some groups, make your own and get your friends to join with you.  Go to peoples blogs and engage in conversation, make your own fun here. If you're liking the spacehey experience i recommend checking out that group i recommended earlier (this one) theres a lot of resources on how you can explore it further.  Next post will be about how spacehey handles its new users and engagement with the community.  Not sure when ill make that but I know wanted to make this post first.  Thanks for reading and I hope some people found use out of this :-]  I'm thinking of making a button linking to this post so I can put it on my other posts but I had the same idea for something else too that might be better sooo idk im thinking about it..  toodles!