TILT- Useful Tools

This Thursday I want to dedicate it to some useful tools for me on the internet that are also keeping me sane.  They are inspiration boards, organizational tools and editing.  I should also call this my shameless promotion TILT except that I'm not endorsed by any of them.  These are my top 3 things I use almost daily.

1. Evernote - I can never gush too much about how useful this has been for me.  I keep all my important documents such as my CCAD classroom handouts and knitting/sewing patterns on here.  It can store word docs, pdfs, jpgs, some video, links, etc. It doesn't need admin rights to download it to a computer and best thing is that isn't limited to your computer either.  I put this on my Kindle fire, Droid X-2 so I can always have access to it.  On my phone I can easily take pictures of things and port them directly into my Evernote for later.  It's free but I opt to use the paid version so I have more space and can use functions like text searching through out all my notes.  Even things like receipts and written notes that you took a picture of can be searched with the paid version.  Paying isn't even that bad it's only $5 a month out of pocket and it auto pays off of my Paypal.

 You can see this sampling of my Evernote above.  I like the style with the thumbnails and descriptions and being able to organize my notebooks however I like.  When Delicious failed on me during their transition off of yahoo I felt panicked that I would lose all my links.  Evernote was like the shining beacon of light that I needed to fill the gap.  It does so much more for me then Delicious ever did.

2. Pinterest - This has been my back up for inspiration if I don't see something I want in my Evernote inspriation files.  It has also allowed me to add new things to my Evernote files.  I feel like it is blog reading on Crack.  I see the most interesting pictures of a tutorial or something and then I click further to get to the real meat and bones blog or website that it originated from.  It can be however another rabbit hole to fall into and a big time suck.

I love using it so much that I have 14 different boards.  It's also a good way  to keep inspiration at your fingertips since you can also access this anywhere and on anything that has internet access. 

3. Delicious -Even though it quite on me before and made me angry, once they fixed it all up I'm happy to be back on it.  As much as I love my Evernote it doesn't keep a slick profile of links the way that Delicious now does.  It also allows me to put my links into different "stacks" of categories make it much more simple for me to do my weekly or monthly blog catch ups in certain areas.

For me it's like the pinterest of blogs and links of things I already had.  For whatever reason I never got into using any of those blog readers out there and I just like to keep my links here on Delicious.