If you’re like many of our readers, you’ve got Ars Technica bookmarked and hit the front page a few times a day. But for others, a compelling story is what brings them here for the first time. And the discussions sometimes keep them coming back.

Since its launch in 1998, Ars Technica has been known for its depth of community. If all you're doing is checking out the front page and the discussion threads that sit beneath each story, you’re missing out on more than you realize.

The Ars OpenForum is a place for readers to ask questions, compare notes, argue (without being jerks to each other), and go down all sorts of rabbit holes. Our Hardware and Tweaking forums cover PC builds, networking, mobile computing, CPUs and motherboards, A/V, and just about any other hardware-related topic you can think of. Stop by the Operating Systems & Software forums for in-depth discussion on Windows, macOS, or Linux or just to have a good, friendly argument over why your preferred OS rules.

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Having it your way is one of the benefits of being an Ars Pro subscriber. You get all of the great content you come to Ars for every day, but you get to choose how you parse it. Some readers want the classic blog-style homepage. Others want as many headlines as possible packed onto one screen. Some want a wider text column; others would happily never see another story about a topic they don’t follow.

We've got you covered.

Both Grid and List views are available for all readers, but subscribing to Ars unlocks two additional layout options. Our old-school Classic view reprises the original site layout from 1998, the year the Ars Orbiting HQ launched.

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If you're a skilled writer with outsize technology chops who gets excited by the idea of taking the Ars audience with you as you go hands-on with hardware—all kinds of hardware!—then this position has your name all over it. Plus, you get to have me as your boss, and how could that be anything other than awesome?!

The job

The formal job description and application is right here and has all the specifics and HR stuff, including salary range. The short summary is that we're looking for an experienced writer (where "experience" means "several years of professional work"), who is a technologist first and foremost. We want people who tinker around with tech because they can't not tinker around with tech; that kind of joy tends to leak out into the work, and it's impossible to fake.

Some specifics on the subject matter the job will cover, copied from the job description:

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Earlier this year, our team worked with the Digital Skills team to develop a short webinar aimed at staff who support students. The goal was to help our colleagues understand how students can use MyEd to traverse our complex digital estate more effectively.

Why the webinar was needed

The primary need that this webinar fulfils is that staff generally aren’t able to see what a student sees in MyEd. MyEd personalises its content and layout depending on the user, so a staff member will have a completely different experience to a student. This is one of MyEd’s key features: students only see content which is relevant to students, and the same principle applies to staff and applicants. However, this does pose a challenge for support staff who need to know how a student can navigate MyEd to complete the tasks that matter to them.

This is something that support staff have fed back to us for some time, so it has been good to develop the webinar as a solution.

We developed the webinar with support staff in mind

When developing the webinar, we made sure that the session was as concise as possible. We settled on a run time of 30 minutes (20 minutes of content and 10 minutes of discussion) as we are aware of the many pulls on our support colleagues’ time.

When deciding on the content, we chose to focus on three elements:

• Explain in detail how the content and layout of MyEd differs between different user types
• Provide a walkthrough of the main tasks that students complete through MyEd
• Demonstrate how the Favourites function in MyEd can be used by students to highlight the items that are most important to them

The webinar needed additional support materials

While we thought that the short demonstration of the student view in MyEd was valuable, we expected that viewers were likely to want to take screenshots for their own personal reference. We thought that this would be undesirable, as such screenshots could become obsolete should the layout or content changed in the future.

For this reason, we decided to provide a set of up-to-date screenshots on the MyEd Support Hub and promote this during the webinar. Now support staff can reference this resource and be safe in the knowledge that the information is remains correct. This resource is available to everyone with a University of Edinburgh Office 365 login:

Student view of MyEd in the MyEd Support Hub

We are planning to continue these sessions in the new year

So far, we have delivered 5 sessions to 61 attendees. Feedback has been positive, with many attendees indicating that the new resource in the MyEd Support Hub was the most interesting part of the session.

We plan to continue to deliver these sessions in the new year. If you or someone you know is interested in attending one of these sessions, please feel free to contact me and I’ll make sure that you are informed when the next batch of sessions are scheduled.