Two Kickin' Web Tricks for Bloggers and Readers

I've got a couple of cards and some more scrapbook pages (8x8 ones!) to post really soon, but in the meantime, I'm excited to share a couple of great little techy tidbits I learned this week. If you already knew about these, feel free to feel superior in your media mastery, but since they were so new and exciting to me, I thought it might be helpful to pass them along.


1. Find out who's pinning your stuff on Pinterest.

(First, if you're not already using Pinterest, you're really missing out on a great way to collect inspiring images and bookmark ideas from all over the web. You should join. And follow me, if you like. And tell me if you're on it, so I can follow you back.)

Tools for bloggers to find out what other sites are linking to their pages have been around for a long time, but thanks to this post at The Speckled Dog, I learned that there's also a super easy way to find out if your images are being pinned.

Just type http://pinterest.com/source/ and then add your blog's web address.

For example:
http://pinterest.com/source/traceyfox.com

This is also a great tool to quickly find an image if you remember what site it was from but don't want to go searching through all of its past posts. If it's a memorable image from a popular blog, chances are pretty good it will come up when you input the blog name into Pinterest like above. Or, you can just obsessively check your own blog for pins and never get anything productive done ever again.


2. Turn shortened RSS feeds into full ones.

I understand why blogs do it. They truncate their feeds in the hopes that you will click through to see their painstakingly-designed sites and hopefully click on their advertiser links and earn them pennies. But nothing makes me unsubscribe from something faster than the inconvenience of a partial feed. So, when I heard Peppermint Granberg offer a solution to this on an episode of The Digi Show, I rushed to my computer to resubscribe to some much-missed blogs.

The secret is http://fulltextrssfeed.com/, a site that will generate a link to a full feed when you input the link to a partial one. Then, you add the new feed's link to your favorite feed-reading app (I use Google Reader), and your days of being forced to click through are over! Life-changing!

Just to warn you, this may not work for every site whose feed you want to lengthen. Katie's first attempt resulted in a full feed that still wouldn't load images, and I've run into one that won't seem to work at all. It's definitely worth a try, though. I've had success with 5-6 other blogs I had pretty much given up on reading, and I plan to attempt it from now on every time I subscribe to a blog and find I'm not getting full content in my reader.


Here's wishing you a great long Labor Day weekend full of pin-checking and blog-reading! Got a favorite web-trick to share? I'm suddenly worried about all the things I don't realize I can't live without.