The Minimalists Guide to Storing Interesting Articles

What do you do with all those interesting and informative blog posts, or articles you find, want to read again, but haven’t got time right now? I think I may have the solution for you.

I came across Flipboard completely by chance. I was browsing my stats page and I seemed to be getting an increasing number of referrals from this ‘thing’ called Flipboard. However, when I clicked through to the links they just failed so I thought it was spam. The following day, I had over 100 referrals just from that site, so I decided to actually Google Flipboard, and low and behold its actually pretty cool (does using the word ‘cool’ make me uncool?! I did cringe a bit writing it, and now I feel old for questioning if I was cool!)

Anyway, if you’re anything like me, you might spend hours reading other blogs or trawling the internet for story research, but where do you put it all? I never really know what to do with all the things I want to read again, it’s not like the old days when you found stuff in magazines and shoved it in a folder or scrap book – I miss getting my fingers smeared with pritt stick and having a physical project book that never quite looked right! These days I just end up clogging my laptop up with dozens of open tabs in my browser, (which stay open for weeks) and then get frustrated when my laptop does an automatic update and closes everything.

Yeah, I could bookmark pages but isn’t that so last decade?! :p Plus I must have at least a thousand bookmarks none of which are particularly well organised. Sigh.

Flipboard is a kind of Pinterest but for word oriented people rather than visual people. It works on the basis of you creating ‘Magazines’ which are effectively a storage folder. You can ‘flip’ articles, blog posts or pictures into your magazines. You can title, rearrange and organise your magazines and articles however you like. It’s basically the ideal solution to storing those interesting blogs, pictures, research or articles you want to keep. It’s minimal effort, sleek, neat and can be visual for those who want it.  But more than anything, its tidy and doesn’t require hundreds of bytes of data to store.

They also have a ‘flip it’ button you can install onto your browser so that you can flip things from anywhere. They have apps for your devices and all the mod cons of a normal social media site, like the ability to follow other peoples’ magazines or general ‘topics’, of which there are thousands.

I am only just getting to grips with this little discovery, but it appears to be a bit of an (undiscovered to me) gem.

Have you heard of Flipboard? Do you use it? Like it? Let me know in the comments.