Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Sunday 22 December 2013

Share multiple sites with a single link - Sqworl looks interesting

I used to be a regular user of Krunchd.com which let you add the links of 10+ websites to a single 'place' so that you could then share a single link. That link would present visitors with a drop-down menu containing all the links you'd shared, you could cycle through the URLs and the relevant page would load - it was great, but the Krunchd website now appears to be permanently down.

There are a few alternative sites but one I've found to be pretty good is Sqworl which lets you combine several pages together into a 'group', shown in a grid format with a thumbnail for each site added (see screenshot below).

Here's one I've just created - London Useful - which acts as a 'meta-bookmark' for some of my favourite London pages, including travel pages and some cultural stuff.



Sqworl's an interesting site. Plenty of people seem to be using it, though from what I can gather they're filling it up with crap. When I searched for London I found that quite a few people had created a page with only a single link on it, which points to a company's site. I'd say they were doing it wrong, although by creating a page which has another pointer to their site they're probably doing something useful in terms of search engine optimisation. But Sqworl does seem to have an awful lot of these otherwise useless pages, though I don't think it has any impact on my own page(s).

As I see it, this site lets you share several pages at once, lets you add a comment (the text below the thumbnails in the screenshot above is from me) and also - importantly - shows a thumbnail icon of the page. I think this is a really helpful visual cue.

I've been looking for this since 2009 ;-)

Fingers crossed it doesn't go the same way that Pageflakes and Krunchd.




4 comments:

  1. Bit.ly has a way to create what they call "bundles" that work similarly, though it doesn't have the nice grid of thumbnails view - just a list with some summary info and a custom comment under each. I use it occasionally, but mostly because I use bit.ly all the time to track click-throughs on my social media posts.

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    1. Ooh I didn't know that about bit.ly. But I *really* like the visual cue given by the thumbnail - four years after I first wondered about it I've found exactly what I was after.

      Delete
  2. Hey Jo! I'm Caleb Brown the founder of Sqworl! I'm very happy you've found us and seem to be enjoying the service. I just wanted to let you know Sqworl has been around for almost 6 years now and we're certainly not going the same way as Pageflakes and Krunchd :)

    Let me know if you have any questions at all: caleb@sqworl.com

    Thanks again for the blog post!

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    Replies
    1. Six years! Goodness me how on earth can I have missed that. Well I'm glad to have found it now, and thank you for your comment :)

      Pageflakes wasn't for me but Krunchd was pretty useful. But Sqworl is exactly what I was after in the first place so hooray.

      Delete

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