Pinterest Pins: Pinning a Blog Post

As I explain in the Pinterest for Discovery and Learning tip, Pinterest is a bookmarking tool, a way to save and share webpage addresses, with an image helping you to remember just what the webpage is about. For the bookmarks to work, it is important that you pin the correct URL (webpage address). With a typical webpage, this is not a problem, but for some kinds of items you might want to pin — especially blog posts — it's worth making sure you are pinning the URL that will take you back to the right location. So, read the information below and then practice pinning some blog posts to your Pinterest Board.

Different Kinds of Blog Pages. A given blog might contain hundreds or thousands of posts, and depending on how you access a blog, you might be looking at a specific post page OR you might be looking at a different kind of page which contains multiple posts. For example, you might be looking at an "archive page" which contains all the posts for a given month, a "label page" which contains all the posts at a blog with the same label, or a "search page" which contains the results of a search of the blog, or the homepage of a blog which contains all the recent posts for that blog. These are all very useful pages for browsing a blog, but they are terrible pages for linking! If you link to the archive page or the label page or the search page, that means you might have to scroll and scroll to find the specific post. If you bookmark the blog homepage, the situation is even worse: the post will disappear from the homepage very soon, so that you might click on the link later but not find the post there at all.

Blog Post TITLE as Link. So, the key thing is to LINK TO THE SPECIFIC POST. That means when you pin a blog post to Pinterest, you need to make sure you are looking at the specific blog post, and only that blog post — not the post on an archive page or a label page, etc. Luckily, it is standard in most blogging software that the title of any post links to that specific post as a specific webpage with its own URL. So, just click on the blog post title, and you should find yourself looking at a page that contains that post, and only that post. Now you are ready to pin the page!

Pin Some Posts. To practice, look through the blog archive pages, label pages, search pages, and homepages in the list below until you find some specific blog post that interests you. When you find a good post, click on the blog post title to make sure you are on the specific blog post page, and then pin that blog post to your Pinterest Board. Do this a few times to make sure you get into the habit of clicking on the blog post title to get the correct blog post address.

• posts labeled "humor" at the Writing Laboratory
• posts labeled "Shakespearean LOLCats" at the Proverb Laboratory
• search for "love" at the Proverb Laboratory 
• posts labeled "Shiva images" at Indian Epics Resources
• posts labeled "Native American books" at the UnTextbook
• posts labeled "Brothers Grimm stories" at the UnTextbook
• search for "coyote" at the UnTextbook
• December 2014 posts at the Bestiaria Latina
• October 2014 posts at the Class Announcements
• posts at the Open Culture blog 
• posts at the NYPL Children's Literature blog
• posts at the Metropolitan Museum Asian Art blog 
• posts at the National Museum of the American Indian blog 
• posts at the British Library: Medieval Manuscripts blog 

Okay, now try the same thing for your own blog by looking at some of your label page which have multiple posts on the same page. Do you see how that works? You can click on a label at your blog to see all the posts with that label, and then you can click on the blog post TITLE to access the specific page for that specific post which is what you want to use when you pin the post to your Pinterest Board.

And remember: this same rules applies to when you are linking to a blog post in your Bibliography or Image Information for this class. You always need to make sure you are linking to a blog post, not to a blog archive page or a blog homepage!

Finishing Up. When you are done, you should have pinned some new blog posts to your Pinterest Board. If you found something really good that would be of interest to the rest of the class, you might also share the blog post image and address at Twitter with the class hashtag (#OU3043 for Myth-Folklore or #OU4993 for Indian Epics). And don't forget to do the Tech Tip Declaration!

(I found this tiny knight battling a snail from a 14th-century ms.
in a post at the British Library Medieval Manuscripts blog,
and I pinned it to my Myth-Folklore Pinterest Board,
and I tweeted it too: Twitter post) 

Then don't forget to do the Gradebook Declaration for Extra Credit. Here is the text of the Gradebook Declaration you will complete: