I was just thinking, as I follow more people on Pinterest, I’m sure I’m missing more and more content shared that I would love to see. It might seem like visual overload, but I just keep seeing so many neat things, I want to see more. However, the more people I follow, the more they pin, the more I am missing.

Do you think there will be a day there are ways to organize Pinterest followers/followees? People boards maybe?

Dear Pinterest, about organizing people I follow

Dear Pinterest, About organizing followers

I can picture it being similar to Twitter with the lists and ability to categorize people together. Right now, even Google + is based on the idea that you can’t possibly read everything from everyone, so group them together in some way to help you capture as much of the information as possible.

I’d love to see Pinterest come up with a way to organize, categorize or otherwise group followers so we can see more without having to sit right here watching all the time.

I’d love to hear what you think… would you like to be able to organize the people you follow? How would you set it up?

PS my iphone app doesn’t work… that’s a post for another day.

Organizing followers on Pinterest is a post from: 100 Directions

Pinterest is fast becoming a fantastic source for both inspiration and promotion opportunities. It’s a great outlet for showing off things you love or have created yourself. I love Pinterest from the designer perspective but I can appreciate the opportunity to use Pinterest as a tool for business promotion as well.

Sample of Pinterest stream for Jen Goode and JGoode Designs

I’m not going to go too deep in the details of using pinterest as there are already some great articles out there sharing the information (see below for links). Instead I’m going to share an overview and ideas of how you can use Pinterest for both personal or business use.

At the core of Pinterest’s concept, think “pin” as in pinning something to a bulletin board on the wall in your office. Things you pin can be blog posts, articles, favorite sites, recipes, whatever. The item you actually pin is a photo from the url you are wanting to save. You pin these items to “boards” which represent groupings of pins.  So you can create categories and save all kinds of things in whatever groupings you’d like and then share with anyone. Let’s dig a little deeper…

The key is the image. Sharing ideas via visuals is an amazing source for creativity. Each image shares something different for different people, so with Pinterest you can “pin”, basically save, an image to whatever grouping you deem appropriate. When you pin an image, the web address associated with that image is tacked on, the association of image to url is included wherever that pin goes. This url/image combo is the key especially for marketing. It’s one thing to save an image to share with friends… we’ve been doing it for years via Flickr, Facebook, etc. However, when someone shares images, usually the url doesn’t follow so our images end up all over the place with no real record of where they came from. Through Pinterest images and their original url travel along happily. This makes it easy for viewers to locate the original content associated with the image… brilliant!

When thinking of “boards”, envision a cork bulletin board with thumbtacks holding various notes, photos and other items all in place. This is similar in concept to Pinterest. You can create “boards”, which are like groups or categories, organized however you like. Then when you “pin” an image, you choose a board to tie it to. Group images together however you like, by theme, subject matter, color, whatever you want. My favorite board for my own account is called “Color me happy”, I pin images of color that inspire happiness for me.

You can pin the same image to multiple boards (creating a new pin each time). You can also add notes when you create a new pin. Tag another user in the notes to call attention or give credit to other users. There really is no limit on how you can save images in your personal catalog.

The image/url combination adds great value because you now know where the image is from and hopefully can easily reference whatever else is relevant. When combined with your ability to group images, you can essentially catalog ideas and information in a visual format while guiding people to the information they are really looking for.

You can also interact with other users of Pinterest. Build a network of followers or follow other’s boards. You can choose to follow all boards, a sampling of only some of the boards or a single board of a user. You can “like” pins from others and you can also “repin” pins from others. Repinning is my favorite feature. “Repinning” gives the opportunity to not only share what others are pinning, but to see who shares things you’ve shared. You can also follow the stream of pins that your followers/friends have saved. Then comment on pins, comment on your own pins or pins shared by others, which in turn is shared with your friends as you go.

So go forth, pin and be merry!

Pinterest takes the concept of “a picture is worth a thousand words” to the next level. Share images and share what they mean to you, how they are important to you and why you want to save them, then let your friends, fans and followers do as they will with the photos, sharing in their own unique directions. This is taking social interaction to an even more intimate level. It’s amazing to see how many different places the same image can go and how different people hold dear their differences… together.

Whether you use pinterest for personal use or want to use it to promote something, just remember that visuals are much more intimate and special. Pinterest users value their pins and boards and don’t want to see a bunch of spammy image sharing. Add great visuals that will inspire something special and you’re sure to find others will love what you pin as much as you do.

More great Pinterest related infos:

Pinterest Beginners Guide from Mashable

Pinterest : a beginner’s guide from Sorta Crunchy

Loving Pinterest and how to use it is a post from: 100 Directions

Thank you to LiveOn for this sponsored opportunity to blog about storing and sharing my most important memories with those closest to me. Although story ideas were provided, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

I had the opportunity to check out, LiveOn, a virtual memory archive builder of sorts. You can document your memories in a variety of ways and the service will store this information for generations to come. Upload photos, write, even capture your own narrative via webcam. You can then add captions, music and tag others associated with the “memory”. Everything remains private in your account unless you want to share publicly and the entire goal is that what you create will remain saved and kept precious from now until forever… even after you’re gone.

The concept itself is rather interesting to me. Being able to document my own time line, memories to share, etc. and then have those moments saved to pass on to family members or whomever I designate is a neat idea. Being a computer geek, I’m wary of sharing so much of my personal history online with any service. That said, the opportunity to share your legacy after you’re gone is a neat one.

The LiveOn promise is:

 We promise to keep your memories forever. Not 100 years, not 500 years, but forever. We have an intricate backup system of servers that will act as your personal vault, ensuring your stories are here for all future generations to enjoy…

I’m a bit skeptical on the use of the word “forever” but I appreciate their goal.  This, however brought up another question from me.. “what if I don’t want my stuff there anymore?”. So I dug a little and found that you can remove your virtual belongings. It might take a little bit of time for everything to finally be removed due to the way the backup systems are set up, working so hard to protect against losing memories, but it seems that you can be removed if you so choose.

When you first start your account with LiveOn there are a number of suggested topics to get you started as well as examples to provide inspiration. I chose to clear it all and start from scratch so I could really get a feel for how everything worked. I found the tools to be terrific although for me the work flow wasn’t entirely intuitive. There’s a little bit of a learning curve, as with any new service, to understanding how everything works together.

LiveOn milestone view

Key features and options:

• Create milestones – these are points on your life’s timeline which contain “memories”.
• Create memories – these are like a memory book within a specific collection of memory books. You can use this for journal entries, photo albums, video diaries, etc.
• Create time capsules – create a “memory” that you can then deliver to someone else, even those outside of the service, choosing to deliver immediately or according to a specific date.
• Share with family, friends or the public depending on what you want to share and how you want to share it.
• Build a tribe – others to share your memories with.
• Answer “life questions” – there is a whole slew of questions LiveOn suggests that you can answer to share your insight and perspective.

LiveOn create new memory view

LiveOn does have a standard service that is free. There are additional upgrades at various fees. Sign up with use coupon code cgc19 when you sign up with LiveOn Rewind to receive 20% off. LiveOn Rewind is a photo scanning and video transfer service.

LiveOn does look like a useful and fun service. There are a few quirks I’d like to see addressed, but this is just the beginning launch of this service so I imagine there will be slight changes and great improvements as time goes on. It’s a neat tool for those that would like to share their story. It’s an easy to use interface with a ton of great features. I’m interested to see where it goes and what others think.

Thank you again to LiveOnfor sponsoring this blog post. Please click here to learn more about storing and sharing your most special memories. I was selected for this sponsorship by Clever Girls Collective. All opinions expressed here are my own.

Review: Preserving memories forever with LiveOn.com is a post from: 100 Directions

I recently started noticing that when I shared a link from one of my WordPress sites, sometimes the associated thumbnails would not show with the shared link. This started happening right about the same time as all the recent major FB changes so I decided to ignore the issue. However, today, at least a week later, I was still having the problem, but not with links from every site. Another facet to the problem, auto publishing of links to Facebook from any of the sites is working fine. So is it a Facebook issue or a WordPress issue?

Link shared on Facebook, thumbnails not showing

Link shared on Facebook, thumbnails showing correctly

So I started digging for solutions and this is what I found…

The issue isn’t entirely resolved, but I did discover a few things to make the problem less of a pain.

1. First, I deactivated Share and Follow, a social sharing plugin I had installed on only two of my sites. I just installed the plugin, and I was only having missing thumbnail issues on those two sites, so that sounded like a logical solution. The problem was only partially fixed. It’s odd to me that a plugin would interfer, but it’s the only recent thing I’ve changed at my end… so worth a shot.
2. If I post a link with a trailing backslash, the images don’t show up (only sometimes). If I remove the trailing backslash, then thumbnails do appear correctly (but only after #1 was dealt with).

I’m not having this issue on all my sites. I haven’t figured out what is wonky between self hosted WordPress installs and Facebook, but at least now I can share links with thumbnails (most of the time) again.

Another interesting discovery…

Domains on Facebook profile won't edit correctly

I was digging through my Facebook profile trying to figure out if something there might have something to do with this problem. I noticed that the one site that isn’t giving me any problems, JGoode.com, is not listed on my Facebook profile. Hmmmm, maybe that’s related. So I figured I’d delete a few other domains that aren’t showing thumbnails correctly and see how that connect. I tried 5 times and couldn’t edit the websites listed. So maybe that’s where some of the issue is too. I won’t know until I can successfully edit the websites on my profile info though.

Have you had any similar issues or do you know a fix? I’d love to hear about it!

By the way, yes, this site, 100directions.com is one of the sites having issues…. bummer eah?

Thumbnails not showing for shared links on Facebook is a post from: 100 Directions

iPhoto doesn’t come right out and tell you that you can use multiple image libraries, but you can and quite easily too. Switching between libraries is as simple as holding down the option key while starting the iPhoto program. You can even store your iPhoto image library on an external drive if you’d like. Along with this option comes a few quirks and issues you might not be aware of.

1. Libraries can sometimes become embedded inside libraries. This can make it difficult to find images and quite frustrating to organize. To see what your library contains, right click on a library in your finder file browser and select “show package contents”. You can then easily copy the photos elsewhere to properly import into a new library.

2. External drives and force create new libraries. If you store your iPhoto library on an external drive and the external becomes disconnected while you have iPhoto running, or when starting up iPhoto, the program may automatically create a new library. Sometimes this new library is difficult to find in your files… where iPhoto thinks it’s saving things, I don’t think anyone knows.

3. Recovering missing photos can be a bear. If new libraries are created and you have no idea where they are in your file structure, finding the contained photos can become a nightmare. The last thing you need is multiple libraries with precious photos you can’t even find when you need them.

Some solutions:

If you find yourself in the situation missing photos or unknown locations of libraries and can’t seem to find the location of newly imported photos, there is a relatively simple fix. Open up iPhoto referencing the new library. While viewing photos (not events) select all photos and then choose “export” from the file menu. Make sure to export to a location you can find later. Then close and reopen iPhoto now referencing the library you want your photos contained in. Import the recently exported photos by selecting the entire directory.

Whatever you do, don’t overwrite anything or reinstall anything. Your photos are there on your computer somewhere.. they just aren’t playing nice.

Remember, if you merely select a library from your file browser and choose to open it with iPhoto, you’re going to view the same set of images no matter with library you’ve picked. You need to, instead, choose the library you want to view by opening iPhoto while holding down the option key.

UPDATE:

Today I found myself struggling to access an image library that was created inside an image library. I couldn’t access the embedded library so the images it contained were completely offlimits… since I had just deleted all the images from the camera I was looking at a loss and not too happy about it.

Thanks to the help of Terence Devlin on the Apple forums, I was able to not only find the library but access all the photos it comtained and import them into my regular library.

Here’s how:

• In the Finder:
• Use the Go Menu and select ‘Go To Folder’
• In the resulting window type
• /Volumes
• And hit return. A Finder window will open at that location. Can you see another iPhoto Library there? If so, drag it to the desktop

– I ended up just dragging the photos I had exported prior to shutting down iphoto and them importing them to my original library.

Happy photo hunting!

iPhoto and multiple image libraries is a post from: 100 Directions

I’ve been hosting a big portion of my web properties on Dreamhost for the last 4 years. In general I’ve been very pleased with the services and options. A year or so ago I was moved to a psuedo private environment and loved it until I started getting the monthly bills. Apparently my amateur coding skills had created a few scripts that were complete resource hogs and my checkbook was paying the consequences.

So, over the last month I’ve been moving to a new host, a new account and a new, much happier bill. The coolest part, the new service even told me where my sites were sucking all the juice from the system… so now the problem is solved, my bank account isn’t screaming at my hosting habit and all is well. Do a hula dance now if you must.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been happy with the account and the support, I’ve just outgrown the service as it was provided.

To top it off, I had a happy account closing experience today. My final bill was going to be $95 plus change. I took the time to delete files, users, email addresses, etc. and managed to knock that fee down to $79 something. Then as I was going through the account closing process I was given a credit (not sure why) resulting in my amount due being knocked down again so I only owed $39.87 – Yay Me!

I am sad to say goodbye, but had to make the change to continue to grow my business.

To end the entire experience, I just received the following email confirming my account closing:

Hello,

This is just an email verification for you that we’ve now closed your
Account as you just requested via our web panel.

You will no longer receive any bills from us (unless you kept an
active domain _registration_ with us) nor other communications.

We’re very sorry it didn’t work out and maybe we’ll see you again
someday!

Sincerely,
The UnHappy DreamHost Goodbye Team

I wish more companies would add some flavor to their commentary! I sure am going to miss the Dreamhost humor.

PS just so Dreamhost doesn’t cry too much, I’ve also left Lunarpages, Planet Domain, GoDaddy and Hostgator in the last year. Moving on…

Changing hosting accounts can be entertaining is a post from: 100 Directions

If you use WordPress with Thesis theme to build affiliate websites, and you’ve been wanting to use Popshops, but not sure how to set it up, here’s a quick tutorial to help you get started. I use Popshops for a number of my sites because I like including links products I use and recommend yet oftentimes these products are available through different merchants. I can design a nice clean grid layout that is easy to up date and includes affiliate links right through my Popshops account that integrates nicely in my WordPress pages and posts.

Popshops offers a number of options depending on which account type you have. If you are unfamiliar with this service, check them out. This is an awesome tool to help you promote products as an affiliate from multiple merchants with relative ease and low maintenance. If you have a premium Popshops account, you can set the links on your website to appear to be a link from your own domain and redirect to the merchant you are promoting.

Here’s how to set it all up…

Let’s first assume you have:

• WordPress installed
• using Thesis Theme for WordPress
• The WordPress plugin Exec Php installed and active
• A premium Popshops account

To make it work you need to:

1. In the Popshops admin, set up your Popshops “shop” with the products you’d like to display.
2. Cut and paste the resulting PHP code into a post or page within your WordPress admin where ever you’d like the shop to display.
3. Now go back to your Popshops account admin and for the same “shop” click on “preferences” and then select the “link redirection” tab.
4. Here you need to check the box to indicate “Have all product redirects point to your own domain.”
5. In the center of this tab there is code you need to copy.
6. Now go to your WordPress install to paste the above code.
   Go To: wp-content > themes > your thesis install > index.php
7. Paste the code from Popshops link redirection preference tab to the very top of Thesis Theme index.php page. You only need to do this once per website as this code is general use for all popshop code. Now any other “shops” you create and display on your website will have the option to redirect from your domain.

Double check everything works by making sure that when you hover over any of your Popshop links, they should be displaying your domain as the root of the link. If they are not, double check that you selected to display the direction for each of your shops.

Using Popshops redirection with WordPress and Thesis Theme is a post from: 100 Directions

Thesis Theme offers an enormous amount of customizing options for your WordPress layout. Teasers is one of my favorite features because displaying excerpts of a post in various locations can greatly increase your page views.

Recently I was trying to figure out how to display a different number of teasers on my front page vs the number displayed on archive pages. Googling for answers I didn’t find much but then I remembered that last year I wanted to display all the posts for a category on a single archive page, so I dug up my old code and it worked like a charm for what I wanted to do today. Here’s how:

1. First set the number of teasers you want to display on your front page.
2. In the standard WordPress admin, view the “reading” page and set your front page “posts to display” number.
3. If you want to display some full posts along with some teasers on the front page, make sure to add the two together when setting your posts to display number.
4. If you would like both full and excerpt listings, you’ll now need to move to your Thesis “thesis options” (1.6 or below) or “site options” (1.7 and above) menu.
5. Here look for “home page display” and then choose the number of “featured posts to display”. These will display as full posts, anything else will be a teaser. So, for example, if you have set 5 posts to display in the WP reading admin, and then you select to feature 2 posts in the thesis menu, you’ll end up with 3 teasers on the front page. Archive pages will show 5 posts (full or teaser depending on your teaser settings… that’s another set of options).

Now the fun. To allow for a different amount of posts on your archive pages, you’ll have to dig into some code.

Navigate server files to:

• wordpress install > wp-content > themes > your thesis install > custom
• in this directory there should be a file called “custom_functions.php”

now add the following code to your custom_functions.php file:

function archive_posts() {
global $query_string;
if (is_archive())
query_posts($query_string . ‘&showposts=1000′);
}

add_action(‘thesis_hook_before_content’,'archive_posts’);

Make sure to change the variable “1000″ to whatever number of posts you want displayed on your archive page. Again, if you want these to be full posts vs teasers, you can adjust this setting via the Thesis admin panel. “1000″ is used as a way to display all posts on the single archive page.

So for me, I wanted 3 posts on my front page, teasers only and I wanted to show 10 posts on my archive pages, all teasers.

So my settings are:

WordPress posts to display: 3

Thesis options, 0 featured posts on front page

Teaser settings, all teasers – archives displaying like front page

and then this code snippet I have query_posts($query_string . ‘&showposts=10

Voila, that’s it!

Teasers and Thesis Theme for WordPress is a post from: 100 Directions

Having content that changes dynamically (on it’s own according to some criteria) is a great way to add some extra interest and diversity to your site without the added time to maintain. Scripts can automatically change various aspects of your site without you doing a thing once the script is installed.This script will display an image depending on what month it is, and will automatically update the image as soon as the month changes.

To use:
Upload GIF images named each month, January.gif, February.gif, etc.

Change the following url in the code below to the location you uploaded all your images:

http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/DIRECTORY-WITH-IMAGES/

Add the following code to the header of your page or site template for your site.
This code also works for Cafepress. Simply include this code either in your custom html layout header area OR, I have it in my “store description” area of my premium shop.

<!– START CODE –>
<script>

var d=new Date()

var month=new Array(12)
month[0]=”January”
month[1]=”February”
month[2]=”March”
month[3]=”April”
month[4]=”May”
month[5]=”June”
month[6]=”July”
month[7]=”August”
month[8]=”September”
month[9]=”October”
month[10]=”November”
month[11]=”December”

document.write(“<img src=http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/DIRECTORY-WITH-IMAGES/” + month[d.getMonth()] + “.gif border=0>”)

</script>
<!– END CODE –>

Display an image according to the month name using javascript is a post from: 100 Directions

I joined Google wave sometime late 2009 but all I did was accept an invite because a friend had invited me to a group. I didn’t bother to try it out let alone look at the features until this morning. The same friend was at a networking event with me last night and was giving me a hard time about not being involved in the Wave… so this morning I decided to jump in and see what it was all about.

There’s a lot of things going on and none of it seems familiar to me. More importantly I had conversations piles up from the group I had joined beginning late November. So first things first, I needed to delete the old conversations. i quickly discovered, there is no sign of a select all button. Every wave has a check box and that’s it. So now what?

As usual, Google help offers a huge amount of information, yet most of it is vague unless you’re specific in your problem – not as helpful as one would like.

So I did a little digging and found a Google Wave 101 help guide at Lifehacker.com. Skimming, I found a mention of using the keyboard shortcuts. That comment paired within info I scrounged from Google help, I discovered the way to delete waves in bulk is relatively simple.

• Select one message
• Scroll down your message list
• Hold down the Shift key and select a message further down the list
• you should see all the message in between the two highlighted as yellow now
• Then click the “unfollow” button at the top of the page.

At this point, it might appear that nothing is happening if you have a ton of messages you’re trying to delete all at once. So refresh your page and you should see all the messages have disappeared. Alternatively you can chose the “trash” button and simply move your messages to the trash.

Note: if you can’t see the trash button at the top nav area, stretch your main Wave window wider to the right, it’s up there, I promise.

I’m not convinced I need Google Wave yet, but if a group I need to network with is there, I guess I need to at least know how to use the tool.

Deleting multiple waves in Google Wave with a Mac is a post from: 100 Directions