I was playing around with Pinterest today (note the neat ‘Pin It’ stuff to make it easy to pin Dabbled stuff!) because I was thinking it could be cool to use Pinterest as a way to create inspiration link posts (like I used to do all the time when I had more time to devote to surfing my feed reader). So with a little bit of research I came up with a cool and easy way to do just that. So first enjoy the Pins below, then after that, look below to see how to easy embed Pinterest pin boards into your blog posts!
Summer Inspirations – Cool things to do this summer…
[prw username=”dorsner” boardname=”summer-inspirations” maxfeeds=”9″ divname=”myList” printtext=”0″ target=”newwindow” useenclosures=”yes” thumbwidth=”170″ thumbheight=”170″ showfollow=”medium”]
Direct Links: Citrus Vodka | Personal sized baked oatmeal | Little Monster Birthday Party – Watermelon Fruit Monster | Pop Rocks Rimmed Cocktails! | Oreo Popsicle Recipe | Edible Cookie Dough Bracelet! | Beaded Crochet Bracelet Tutorial | Strawberry chocolate jello shots | Guiness Ice Cream Car Bomb Sundae
How to add a Pinterest Pin Board to a Blog Post (WP)
This was not overly obvious, and required a bit of research, but basically there is an RSS feed for any of your pin boards on Pinterest. Example: http://pinterest.com/dorsner/summer-inspirations/ board’s RSS feed is http://pinterest.com/dorsner/summer-inspirations/rss . Once you know that you have a feed, you’re halfway there, and there are probably multiple ways to handle it.
I took the quick way out and snagged the Pinterest RSS Widget plugin so I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Conveniently enough, not only does the plugin allow you to add a widget to your sidebar with any Pinterest feed, they also include a shortcode that makes it super easy to embed the pin board directly into a post.
So for the board above I used the following shortcode – replace the curly brackets } with square brackets ], obviously. The syntax is pretty self explanatory, but the explanation for each field is here. The username is your Pinterest name, the boardname is the name of the board. Max feeds is the number of posts you want to show. The divname is for styling (I didn’t worry about that here). Printtext determines if you want to include text- I didn’t. I set the thumbwidth/height to 170 to make 3 across, nicely spaced.
{prw username="dorsner" boardname="summer-inspirations" maxfeeds="9"
divname="myList" printtext="0" target="newwindow" useenclosures="yes"
thumbwidth="170" thumbheight="170" showfollow="medium"}
And that’s really all there is to it. It was easy to do, so I will probably do it again sometime, as a good way to collect links. I know there are mixed feelings in the crafty blogging world about Pinterest, and I’ll admit I haven’t really done much with it yet, but I do think it does have some excellent potential.