What’s Pinterest?

So what’s Pinterest?  Basically, it’s an online corkboard, where someone can create “boards” and “pin” items.  The items can be from just about anywhere on the internet, and you get to write a description.  And other people can see your boards and what you’ve pinned.

Some people use Pinterest to create boards of things they’re thinking of buying, or to plan an event such as a wedding or group travel.  For The Boat Galley, I’m using it to organize and share information in a way that I never could here.

I’m creating a whole bunch of boards, each on a topic of interest to “cruisers” — some will be of more interest to trailer-sailors and others to circumnavigators, while some may apply to almost anyone with a boat (and some even to RVers and tent campers).

Sure, some of the items will be articles I’ve written for The Boat Galley, but others will be from other sites I’ve discovered over the years.  The neat thing about Pinterest is that it lets me combine a variety of items all into one list, and organized in ways that are virtually impossible here on TBG.

If you’re not familiar with Pinterest, here’s a quick tutorial on using it (I’m not showing all the features, just a few to get you started).  Right now, you have to “request an invitation” to join Pinterest (most days, invitations come within 24 hours) but you can explore the boards even without joining (I encourage you to join so you can set up your own boards and pin interesting things to them).

Let’s say you want to explore The Boat Galley’s boards.  Click on Pinterest Boat Galley Boards.  In a new tab, you’ll see a screen that looks similar to this (it’s slightly different on different computers and with different browsers):

Scroll down the page to see all the different boards — the names are pretty self-explanatory.  If you sign up with Pinterest, you can choose to “Follow All” meaning you follow all the boards, or you can choose to just follow individual ones that interest you.  For now, we’ll assume you’re not on Pinterest and just want to see the contents of a particular board — say the one on Living without Refrigeration.

Click on any image in the box under the heading, as shown by the big red arrow:

You don’t have to click on any particular image and — this is the weird part to me — the title isn’t a link, so  you can’t click it.  Just click on an image.  That whole board will then be shown, like this:

You can scroll down and see everything that I’ve pinned as being a good resource — in this case, on living without refrigeration.  You can read the descriptions on each.  Want to see more on one of the items?  There are two ways, shown by the arrows below:

As shown on the left, you can click on the site name and it will take you directly to the article (in some cases, where I’m listing an entire site, it will take you to the home page of that site).

Clicking on the image, or as on the far right, a video, will show the image in a new screen (and videos will start playing on the new screen).  From that image screen, clicking the image again will take you to the associated article or home page.

I’m really excited to be able to share interesting resources from across the internet like this and hope readers find it useful!  Click here for a list of the boards I’ve set up so far — but I’m adding new ones and pinning new items daily, so check back often . . . or follow!

Go to The Boat Galley on Pinterest >>