Sphinn Your Friends With Simple Bookmarks!
One pet peeve I have had with Sphinn is checking the submits by sphinner. Many times I feel like I am missing good items that friends submit because, well lets face it, you can’t be sphinning around the clock and see them all come through What’s New. In order to check submits by sphinner now on Sphinn you have to locate the sphinner most likely through the network page where you may have to search or page for the sphinner if they are not a top sphinner on the first page.
Once you have found your sphinner it takes 2 clicks to get to their submit page. Moving from one friend’s sumbits page to the next friend’s submit page will take you at least 4 clicks(2 back to the network page, 1 on the next sphinner name to info tab and 1 more on the submit tab), that’s if you are lucky enough to have your next friend on the same network page as the previous one. This takes too long if you want to follow multiple friends and pay them the respect of looking at their submits which is how a friend might like to treat another friend.
I finally got tired of all this clicking and figured “Hey, I could use simple bookmarks in my Firefox browser to check sphinner submit pages.” And what do you know, it works like a charm! It takes me one combo click to open my bookmarks and have a big list of Sphinn friends right there on the screen next to my open Sphinn page. Then I can go down the list with 1 click per friend to see their submits. Simple, short and sweet! It saves a bunch of time and I don’t miss what those that I want to follow are sphinning. If you are wondering, it only took 10 or 15 minutes to get a nice size list of folks added to my list.
One concern with this method is you may get out of the habit of seeing the new faces and submits by folks you don’t have bookmarked. Because of this I made sure to put a bookmark for the What’s New page right at the top of my list and always check it when I check other friends. When I notice a new sphinner doing a lot of good stuff I can simply add them to my list. I also put the hot front page in my bookmarks, but I’m not sure why. The front page is probably the page I visit the least because I have seen most all of these stories already. The What’s New page is where the action is HOT!
January 18th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Good idea Chris … especially since they removed the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed for each person’s submission page just recently. Very timely.
January 18th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Wow, great idea!! I’ve been having some issues staying up to date with what’s going on at Sphinn lately. The Sphinn Community has grown so large that I have been missing things that I wish I hadn’t. In order for me not to miss anything requires me to be on Sphinn 24/7 and I just can’t do that. I will have to try this idea…. it’s a good one.
Shana
January 19th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Thanks for coming by Jeff and Shana and thanks for the comments. Glad to hear you like the idea.
Hey Jeff, I still see a link to subscribe to a sphinner’s submits. If you go a to sphinner’s submit page you will see an orange rss icon just to the left of the info tab. that will get you the feed of their submits. I tried following a few feeds in my Google reader but it was not very handy. I could not sphinn with out clicking through to the story on sphinn.com. So i ended up going back to trusty old browsser based bookmarks which work very well for this.
Thanks!
January 20th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Simple and effective though I submit things so rarely
that perhaps I shouldn’t be the screenshot! Though its nice to know I’m on your list
January 20th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Hi Tim,
It’s quality over quantity.
Thanks for stopping by to comment!
January 20th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
[...] is Sphinn Your Friends With Simple Bookmarks by Chris Dohman, this is a really good post and a very simple tip that saves a lot of time when you [...]
January 20th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
[...] Sphinn Your Friends With Simple Bookmarks! | North Rock Publishing In order to check submits by sphinner now on Sphinn you have to locate the sphinner most likely through the network page where you may have to search or page for the sphinner if they are not a top sphinner on the first page. (tags: Sphinn Bookmarks) [...]
January 31st, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Chris, I love this idea. So simple, yet so useful.
February 1st, 2008 at 12:31 am
Thanks Jon! Glad you can find it useful.
February 3rd, 2008 at 7:15 pm
[...] is Sphinn Your Friends With Simple Bookmarks by Chris Dohman, this is a really good post and a very simple tip that saves a lot of time when you [...]