Hey Visitor! Did you know you can create an account on this site? Well you can. This page talks about some reasons you may want to.
When you sign up for an account on kentcdodds.com, you can choose between the Red, Yellow, or Blue team.
When you connect your KCD account to your Discord account, your username will be set to the color of your team and you'll have access to an exclusive Discord channel for your team.
As you read blog posts, your reads will be recorded and your team will get points as described below.
You can even take it to the next level and grab a team t-shirt (sold at-cost)!
Why the Koala?
The Koala's name is Kody. He's the mascot for the KCD Community. If you've gone through Kent's Workshops and Courses you've probably gotten to know him quite well. He appears as an "emoji" (🐨) in the instructions anytime you're supposed to actually do something.
I found when I was creating self-paced workshops it was difficult for people to distinguish between explanations of "why" we're doing something and the bits that tell learners "what" they're supposed to actually do. So I came up with the emoji idea and it's worked out well. Interestingly the first time I did this, I went with 🐯 Terry the Tiger, but for some reason I switched to Kody the Koala 🐨 and it stuck.
Read Rankings
When you read a blog post, that's marked in the database and your team gets points (note, this requires that you're logged in so the proper team to associate the read with is known). Whichever team has the most points gets the highest ranking and "owns" that blog post. You'll notice which team is winning based on the graph at the top and bottom of the post as well as the highlight color throughout the post. There's also an overall leader and that team color controls the color of the blog page.
Because you can choose your own team, the teams can be different sizes, so we don't just compute the teams by total number of blog post reads. Additionally, you get credit for every time you read a blog post.
So here's how it works:
- A blog post is marked as "read" when you've scrolled through the whole thing and you've been on the page for long enough to have actually read it.
- For any given post, you get a recorded read every 7 days.
- The team ranking is computed by taking the total number of recent reads divided by the total number of active members.
- A team member is considered active if they've read a blog post in the last year.
- A read is considered "recent" if it was read within the last 6 months.
So there you go. That's what the ranking is all about.
Filtering Posts
On the blog page, you can filter posts by team. Simply click on the team stat and it will update your query to show only posts with that team as the leader. Click it again and it will show only posts where that team is not the leader. And clicking it once more will remove that from your query. Give it a shot.
Changing Teams
You can change your team... But it's going to require a bit of work on your part: learn more.