Pinterest

I'm a Pinterest addict.  (Are you noticing a trend here?)  I've got almost 4000 pins neatly organized on 113 boards.  :-)  You can check them out here:  http://www.pinterest.com/amypintx/  Some people create separate school and personal accounts but that's way too much trouble for me.  I've got everything from Google Drive resources to recipes to photography tips to Pokemon party ideas (my son is 8!)  

Here's some Pinterest tips:

• Create boards for specific topics rather than general ones.  For example, rather than having a generic "School" or "Education" board, have specific boards for subject areas, classroom management, educational technology, etc.  My opinion is that it's better to have more boards with fewer pins than fewer boards with a ton of pins that you have to search through.

• In the "Pin it" window, boards show up in the drop down list alphabetically.  Name your boards so that similar boards group together alphabetically.  For example, all of my education related boards start with "School-_____", like School- Google Drive, School- Google Forms, School- Classroom Management.  All of my recipe boards start with "Food-___", like Food- Crock Pot, Food- Sweets, etc.

• Don't follow a ton of people.  Follow only those who pin things you love.  The more people you follow, the more bogged down you'll get in stuff that you don't care about.

• Unfollow specific boards.  When you follow someone, you usually follow all their boards by default.  If there are boards that you aren't interested in, you can unfollow those specific ones. 

• When re-pinning, change the description text if it's too vague or doesn't apply to you.  The more specific you are, the easier it will be to find the pin later.

• If you notice that you're pinning a lot of stuff from the same blog, consider adding that blog to your Feedly so that you don't miss any good stuff!

•  Add content... don't just repin.  When you find a blog post you like, pin it! I use the Chrome Extension "Pin It Button" to make it easy.


What are your favorite Pinterest tips?

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Feedly and How to Save Favorite Blog Posts

I'm a blog addict and have over 350 feeds in my Feedly in various categories from education to technology to iOS to cooking to digital scrapbooking. I've been using Feedly since last summer when my beloved Google Reader shut down.  I don't love it but I tried practically every alternative (literally!) and it was the best option for me.     

My biggest complaint is the "mark as unread" link.  If you want to mark an item as "unread" to come back to later, you have to scroll all the way back to the top of the article.  How hard would it be to add the same "mark as unread" code to the bottom of each post???  It's a small thing but it drives me crazy.

Also, I hate the app so I use the paid app Reeder instead. It's a much simpler interface and worth the money to me considering the amount of blogs I read.

The big question is what do you do with blog posts that you like?  How do you mark them so that you can find them later?  I'm not a fan of browser bookmarks because they're so hard to search through.  Here's what I do with blog posts I want to remember later:

•  Pinterest - I'm a Pinterest addict as well as a blog addict so it's great that Feedly has a built in Pin It feature.  Hover over a picture in a feed and you'll see the "Pin It" button appear.   Tip:  Occasionally a Pin It button won't appear because the picture is smaller than the minimum requirements for Pinterest.  If you want to pin that post, you'll have to click the post title to open the actual blog site and pin it from there.

•  Pocket to Evernote -  I also love to use Evernote to save things for later because it's so easy to search for exactly what you want. The Save to Evernote feature is a "Pro" feature in Feedly meaning that you have to pay for it.  Since I'm a super geek, I work around that by using a combination of Pocket and IFTTT (If This Then That).  If you're a super geek like me, here's how: 

1. Create Evernote.com, GetPocket.com and IFTTT.com accounts. 
2. In IFTTT, go to the Channels section and activate your Pocket and Evernote accounts. 
3. Create a recipe in IFTTT to send anything you add to Pocket to your Evernote. There's a bunch of already created recipes that you can use if you search "Pocket to Evernote" when you click the Browse button. Here's what my "recipe" looks like:

Once you've got that set, anytime you click the "Add to Pocket" icon in Feedly, a new note will automatically be created in your Evernote.  IFTTT can be a little complicated at first but once you get the hang of it, you can use it to automate many online functions. 

How do you save posts you want to access later?

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