Hi fellow crafters! Today I want to share with you some of my favorite resources for browsing and saving inspiration online. If you’re just starting to navigate the waters of blogging and social media, these tools are great for keeping yourself organized and from getting overwhelmed. I hope you find them helpful!
~Shannon
http://www.littleelephantstitchery.com/
Google Reader
If you’re anything like me, you could spend hours upon hours grazing upon the many hundreds of beautiful blogs out there that are full of inspiration. But how can you manage them all without having to check in on them individually? That can get so very tedious, and you’re likely to miss out on things from time to time. You must get yourself set up with a news reader, which is a great tool – it catalogs recent posts from your favorite RSS or atom feeds such as blogs, news sources, etc. Make an account at http://www.google.com/reader/ (or use your existing Google account) and you can immediately jump right in. Subscribe to blogs you read regularly within your reader, and you now have a single site you can visit to click through recent posts.
You can always click through to visit the post within the original site, but browsing your subscriptions within the reader first saves tons of time and easily keeps you up-to-date. You can also catalog your subscriptions into categories, which is helpful for keeping things organized.
I check in with my reader at least once a day and quickly tap through the day’s posts, clicking through to the blogs that sound particularly good to me. It is the only way I can keep up with everything that’s out there!
Delicious
Once you get hooked on Google Reader (and you will) you’ll start discovering more and more blogs, tutorials, and interesting posts you want to save for later. Bookmarking is the best way to do this, but what if you might be on as many as 3 different computers during the day, plus your smart phone? I know I am, from my home desktop and laptop to my work computer and my Droid phone. Get an account with Delicious (http://www.delicious.com/), which is a web-based social bookmarking site. You can get little icons or bookmarklets for your web browser on each of your computers, and when you see something you want to save, just click your bookmarklet to save it. You can add tags to describe each bookmark, and you can organize your tags into tag bundles.
Delicious has been a lifesaver for times when I vaguely remember seeing something once, but don’t remember where I found it – I can go straight to my Delicious bookmarks, do a quick search, and 9 times out of 10 what I’m looking for shows up because I had bookmarked it at one point. I have found it to be much more practical than regular old browser-based bookmarking.
Pinterest
What about saving something that doesn’t necessarily warrant a bookmark – but you still love the idea for inspirational purposes? Or it’s a lovely picture, and you just want to be able to look at it from time to time? If you’re a fan of creating inspirational mood boards, for a purely visual approach to social bookmarking, check out Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/). If you haven’t joined yet, I warn you – it is a completely and totally addictive substance. You have to have an invitation to join, so if you want one, just leave your email address in the comments and I’ll happily send you one. Here is my Pinterest if you want to check out how it works: http://pinterest.com/shannonemiller/
With the same concept of using bookmarklets in your web browser for tagging links with Delicious, on Pinterest you can “pin” items to a variety of categorized “pinboards” (which you can add and edit to your heart’s desire). Say you’re on a blog post and you see a lovely picture of a Christmas craft that you want to save – click “pin it”, and then select the picture you want to save as well as a pinboard, such as “Crafty Christmas Ideas”, and add a brief description, like “paper pinwheel ornaments”. Voila – now you’ve added a piece of eye candy to your “Crafty Christmas” pinboard; and everyone who follows you can see it. Additionally, followers can “repin” your pin to their own boards, and vice versa (I do most of my pinning and repining directly from browsing on Pinterest). There is even an iPhone app (although I haven’t quite figured out how to pin from my Droid yet).
Your pin will always link back to the site from which it came, so if you want to actually see the tutorial for or price of something, it’s usually as simple as clicking through. Plus, you can search the entirety of Pinterest for cool pins, boards and users to follow. Later, when you need a little pick-me-up, just go take a gander at what you’ve pinned to your boards and soak it in. For creatives like ourselves, Pinterest is a neverending buffet of loveliness!
I hope these resources have been helpful to you! I could go on and on about all the web tools I like to use, but I would have to say that these are my current favorites. Starting my day off with a cup of coffee and a Pinterest stop really gets me motivated these days. Do you have favorite tools you like to use online? Share the comments below!
