A Pinterest Note

Warning: Completely unrelated to Skirt Week.

Totally stole Adrianna's baby's photo to help make my point. 

There are lots of reasons to love and hate Pinterest. Most of which have already been stated and re-stated and argued and re-argued. What I have to say, at least in this post, is more informative than anything else.

Sometimes you'll be reading a blog post. And you'll see something you'd like to pin. So you pin it. But you don't notice that you're pinning while you're on the main page of the blog. By "main page" I mean a page like this is displayed in your browser bar:

    http://www.crafterhoursblog.com

rather than the "deep link" like this:

    http://www.crafterhoursblog.com/2012/05/im-vintaging-my-may-at-craftiness-is.html

So the image you're pinning then links to the main page of the blog, and not to the individual post where the image resides. Which means that anyone who tries to follow your pin (even you, if you're going to actually read it again or more or follow the directions for a tutorial) will not find the post, just the homepage. Annoying, right? And maybe you've already followed someone elses's pin to the "source" only to find that you've been linked to the main page of the blog and not to the individual post where the stuff you're trying to see lives. It's frustrating.

BUT... there's a way to fix that after you've pinned something. And, I admit, I've done this a number of times myself. But it's cool-- 'cause we learn. And we can fix it!

Here's an example pin. If you'd clicked on this before I fixed it, you would've gone to our homepage. To fix it, we'll click on the "Edit" button to the upper left.

See what's in the box below? Just the homepage address.

By copying and pasting the direct link, it'll save you, me, --the whole big wide happy world-- frustration. Easy peasy.

Since you know how to do that, you can also see how easy it is for some unscrupulous folks to take a lovely pin and redirect the traffic for that image to a place that's completely unrelated and maybe scary. I'm sure Ben and his team are working on that. (We've had a few people reach out to tell us about this problem happening with some of our images, and if we could fix that, we would.) But for now, at least you know how to neaten up your own pins as you go along.

Thanks to Tonya for reminding me to blog about this. Now back to previously scheduled Skirt Week programming.