Taming the Internet

This post was originally published at Songbird. If you like DIY inspiration of the home and decor kind, than please visit me there.

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Do you recognize this? You have some free time and the energy to start a new project. You are about to go get the paint, the glue gun or the fabric pile when you think ‘someone did this already, let’s look up that blog post where my inspiration came from’.

And then it all falls apart with the speed of light. You start searching blog after blog, reading post after post, frantically trying to remember where you saw that idea. Going through all of the files on your computer, in the desperate hope that you were smart enough to bookmark it. But in which folder?

Photo found on Flickr

I have spent so many hours looking all over the net trying to retrace my steps and find that one piece of information I had seen before and I really needed now.

But I have found a better way. Let me share my two favorite tools I use to organize my internet use. You might call them my external memory.

Let me start by introducing you to Delicious.

I use Delicious for all the sites I used to bookmark in My Favorites folder. Delicious has a couple of advances over bookmarking:

• It is cloud based, which means the bookmarks are saved up there in the WWW. If your computer crashes your bookmarks will not be lost and you can get to them from everywhere were you have internet access.
• Delicious uses tags. With every bookmark you save you can add as many tags as you like, and if other people have bookmarked this page also, Delicious will even suggest tags to you. This way you don’t have to guess later if you have filled that nice pattern for a bag under ‘tutorial’, or ‘sewing’ or ‘bag’. It will be under all three.
• Delicious comes with a couple buttons you can put in your toolbar. Which makes adding a bookmark a matter of hitting a few keys.
• You can choose to make your Delicious public or keep it completely private.

Ok, but I am a visual person and often I only want to remember where I saw a certain picture and the content or subject of the post doesn’t really matter to me. I just want to save that picture. For these instances I use Tumblr.

Tumblr basically is a blog. Except it is designed in a way that makes it easy to reblog something, which means that if you have found a text, video or image you want to share with others, you reblog it on your own Tumblr blog.

Tumblr comes with its own toolbar button too, with one mouse click I can share something on my Tumblr blog. I usually only save photo’s and in that way Tumblr has become my own personal photo album or inspiration file with the added bonus that I will always have the link to the original post attached. Giving credit back to the owner of the photograph becomes much easier that way.

I will gladly share my sources of inspiration with you. You can find my Tumblr blog up there in my navigational bar under INSPIRATION.  Go on, check it out, you might even find one of your own photographs in there.

Setting up both a Delicious account and a Tumblr account is really easy. Just try it and use their help function, it really is quite self-explanatory. A good place to start with Delicious is their starter page. And for Tumblr I found this explanation post very helpful.

Good luck with taming the internet!

Love,

Marianne