Wednesday, April 18, 2012

How I Heart Clipix and RSS Feeds


Various clipboards that you can create to manage your images/files/articles/videos etc

An example of my YourTube Video clipboard
Life before Clipix

First there was printing off articles, recipes and pictures you liked and if you really liked a site, then you bookmarked it. Then came the bookmarking tabs which made favourite sites accessible with one click.

Then came RSS Feeds and the ability to subscribe to websites and blogs you wanted to follow. This made it easier to check on the newly published materials on each of your favourite site whichout having to physically click on them in your bookmark listing and now you don't even have to visit the actual site. Yes I'm talking to you, my lurking subscribers ;p

Before Clipix.com came along, I would subscribe to the RSS Feeds of websites and blogs that I liked. Even if it was just two recipes that I wanted to try off a cooking blog. It was a) subscribe to blog b) star the item on my feed reader.

Problems eventuated- the inability to organise my starred items. The piles of unorganised starred and favourited items etc

Life after Clipix

It's very similar in concept to Pinterest- the new, hot, social networking darling site. Clipix was insanely easy to join up and use. All you need is an email address and a password. Then you right click to add the little clip button to your favourite toolbar and off you go.

It is fabulous for several reasons

1. Create multiple clipboards with topics such as: Recipes, YouTube Videos, Gift Ideas for Mum/Friend/Husband/Sister/Baby, Dresses, Shoes, Fashion, Craft, Books To Read, Interesting Articles etc. Normally you can't favourite YouTube videos for example unless you open up an account-you can save them to your bookmarks but then the bookmarks are bulging and only accessible on the specific PC or laptop browser your bookedmarked them on and not from anywhere around the world at anytime. Clipix bypassed that problem and you can favourite your videos without a YouTube account.

2. As you stumble across items on the net, instead of just thinking, 'oh, so and so would like that and it would make a good birthday present' you could clip it to your clipboard for gift ideas for them.

Without Clipix or Pinterest, the old way would have been to either a) email the link/article/image to yourself b) save it to your PC/laptop/phone or whatever in some jumbled disorganised pile or c) print it out and then stash it somewhere and forget all about it

3. You can login to Clipix from anywhere with an internet browser and everything on your 'Clipboard' is instantaneously accessible

4. If Clipix, Pinterest and RSS Feeds came along before blogging, I'd probably have never started blogging in the first place

Admittedly my very first blog on Geocities involved typing up pages and pages of html. That came about because I wanted to have my bookmarks accessible anywhere and technology/apps/programs weren't as great as now.

If I bookmarked something on my home PC, I wanted to beable to access it at my friends houses on their PC and basically any PC anywhere- thus my original blog had all my favourite bookmarks which I could access from multiple PCs. Back then, Google didn't exist, Facebook didn't exist, wireless 3G/4G internet didn't exist, smart phones didn't exist, cloud/hosted/remote computing didn't exist and pretty much the comfortable things in technological life didn't exist. Even flat screen LCD tvs were unheard of.

Maybe no-one remembers it but before browsers were designed so that you can open up multiple tabs/sites within one browser, instead you would have heaps of Explorer windows open. So yes, we've come a long way in terms of technology and the innovation/websites/programs out there designed to help us handle technology a lot more easily.

Which sites, products or software has made significant changes to the way your manage your technological life?




2 comments:

  1. Wow, I totally forgot about having to open multiple browser windows! I've been using Clipix for a little bit now, too, and I agree; it's fantastic.

    Have you used the "syncboard" feature yet? ...it's basically a clipboard that you can share publicly/privately with whomever you want, and everyone can add things in. I've been using it for school projects, and sharing gift ideas secretly.

    Definitely worth checking out!

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  2. Hey Olivia, yeh it's been a long time and even the internet wasn't really mainstream until early 2000s. That was when Hotmail was all the rage because Google was yet to be invented...hard to believe that in just a few short years, Google has dominated almost everything.

    No I haven't used that feature yet- thought I'd just use clipix for myself but now that you mention being able to share gift ideas secretly- I can see the potential and that would easily solve the stressful times of trying to figure out what gifts to buy! I'll check it out- thanks for the tip xD

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