Thursday 23 February 2012

tutorial | how to add the pinterest bookmarklet

If you live under a rock, you may not know about Pinterest. You may not be aware that pinterest has changed the way the everybody collects ideas and shares them. You can imagine my surprise when I went to the blogger's meet and greet ealier this month and discovered that some bloggers only browsed pinterest, because they didn't know about the awesomeness that is the pin it button!


You can see from my toolbar that I have several buttons on it. They all make life so. much. easier. when I want to share something on pinterest or facebook, or I find a blog I want to follow that doesn't have google friend connect (which is being removed from all non-blogger-blogs from teh start of much, so you need to know about this button!) I also have a button from Print Friendly up there, handy when I want to print a blog post or create a PDF to save it to my computer.

 To add the pin it button, you need to go to the "about" drop down menu, and click "pin it button" This is slightly misleading, as it doesn't take you there, but we'll go and have a look at what's available.

ETA - I've just visited the link on pinterest and the "pin it" button has been moved to the top of the page below. Just grab it and drag to your tool bar as outlined below.

You'll come to the "goodies" page. There you'll find a link to the app for iPhone (if you don't have it yet, get it, great for those times you're waiting for something)

Next is the coding for adding a "follow me" button to your side bar. Just choose the button you want, and copy and paste the code (on blogger, you add a HTML widget, and paste the code into that)

Next up is the code for adding a "pin it" button to the end of every bog post (or the beginning). I haven't done this yet, but I believe it's just a matter of copying and pasting the HTML code into the code screen, and that's it. There is also a way to embed the button into your blog coding (so it appears on every post), but I'm still working on figuring that one out.

Last up is a series of downloadable files of the pinterest logo. I used them to make the pinterest button in my side bar.

A word of warning - I used the PNG file, and it is enormous! The canvas size is over 100 inches long! When I created my 250px button, I had to reduce the size before dragging onto my new canvas.

Now we've seen what's available, let's add that button to our toolbar.
Start by clicking the "Add +" button

This funny little window will pop up. You want to click the link that I've circled above.

Now click and drag the button up to your toolbar. It will be available wherever there is space, but you can rearrange your buttons just by dragging to the end of the toolbar (and then they will slide up one place)

Pinning Etiquette
There are lots of posts about pinning etiquette. Pinterest even includes a guideline on their about page. In broad terms, don't pin your own posts; add a good description of the pin if it isn't obvious; wherever possible, pin from the source, not a search. I'll show you what I mean.

Bad pinning is when you pin an image from the blog (or website's) main page. If someone decides to follow the link, they will only come to the mainpage, not the postthey're interested in.

Good pinning means clicking on the title of the blog post, and pinning from the permalink.

You can see that when I clicked on this post, that the only images brought up were the ones in the post (and the HTML coded widgets)

How do you see posts?

I just learnt a couple of days ago that if you click once to bring up the window above, then double click, it will take you to the permalink for the picture. Or else you can click the URL just below your name at the top of the screen. (I forgot to add an arrow to this picture)

Tips & Tricks
  • see this post from the Blog Guidebook  if you DON'T want anyone to pin from your blog
  • I often don't see new pins in my feed. This usually means that I'm following too many boards. Now I'm more selctive about which boards I follow - instead of "following all", I pick the ones that have titles (or images) that interest me. And I regularly cull the people I follow (I find less than 50 is the best number for a good variety of images)
  • browsing "everything" is also a great way to see what others are pinning, and giving me ideas for the things I'd like to search for on pinterest.
  • browse your "liked" pins regularly. You can unlike by clicking again, or repin to your boards if it still interests you.
I'm going to edit some boards today (I have 85!). Happy pinning!

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4 comments

  1. AWESOME post, Cate! LMK if it's okay for me to share a link to it this coming Tuesday when I do my weekly Pinspiration post :) I've tried several time doing the "pin it" button for the end of my posts and couldn't get it to work @@

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Beverly, by all means, feel free to share it. I'm working on a post for next week about adding the pin it button to posts, I believe there's two ways to do it, so I'm investigation both.

      Delete
  2. Great post Cate...I hadn't realised about clicking the post title...am off to try it now!
    Alison xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great post...I think I have been guilty of bad pinning because of my lazy/lack of understanding. Will be thoroughly researching your tips :)

    ReplyDelete

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