What Happened To Pinterest

What Happened To Pinterest

I love Pinterest.  A lot.  Its great to be able to pin a new recipe, inspired room, or DIY craft.  Having everything on one page is so convenient.  I no longer have tons of bookmarked websites.  Or folders in my file cabinet filled with magazine pages.  Yay!

But...

Lately, it seems the spammers have taken over.  At first, I noticed that if I searched for something, like a "pillow", some of the pins that would come up would lead to spam.  OK, I can handle that.  I would try to click through but there would be no tutorial or shop.  Just spam.  Boo.  In the last few weeks, Ive noticed a huge shift towards spam.  Now if I search for "pillow", I get this -

OK.  Nice pillow but not exactly what I was looking for.  The spammers have learned to write a caption that will get noticed (In this example, the caption is "Pillow pillow pillow pillow")  Btw, every one of these pins is spam (not a shocker).  And, every one of these pins has already been reported as spam.  So, why are they still showing up?

I wasnt ready to lose hope just yet.  I decided that the best way to find new things was to skip the search bar and just repin things from users that I follow only.  Which has helped a lot.  (This is where I need your help - Id like to follow you!  Please leave a link to your Pinterest boards in the comments and Ill follow you.  If you are interested, you can find my boards here)  I also pin things that I find all over the web.  Problem solved, right?

Nope.

Last night, we attended my sons high school graduation.  Super fun!  So proud of him!  Anyway, when I returned home, I hopped onto my computer and did some surfing.  Of course that meant checking out Pinterest.  And something caught my eye.  I happened to notice that someone had left a comment on one of my pins.  Which doesnt happen too often.  I clicked on the notification, and found this -

This is one of my boards.  Except it isnt.  Somehow, a spammer created a whole new board in my account.  And pinned a really crazy image - 

This is all fake.  I had absolutely nothing to do with it.  I didnt create that board and I didnt pin that image.  And most likely, if I hadnt seen that notification, I wouldnt have caught this on my account for a long time.  (Actually, I have no idea how long its been there.  It wasnt even the last board on my wall - it was somewhat camouflaged in the middle.)  I marked the pin as spam and deleted the board (there was no way of marking the whole board as spam).  This was completely out of my control.  And that makes me nervous.  I have over 1300 pins.  I plan on going through each and every one of them over the next couple of days to make sure they are legit.  I also changed my password.  Im hopeful but I dont know if it will stop this fake board and pin spam from happening again.  

Has this happened to any of you?  Have you seen this before?  Are you a little nervous about the security (or lack there of) of Pinterest?  Im really hoping that they will be able to add more layers of control so this doesnt happen again.  My fingers are crossed - I dont want to go back to a pre-Pinterest world!

What Happened To Pinterest

What happened to January

What happened to January

Of the 31 days in January, I only spent six here at home in Tasmania. Unfortunately this meant I missed the summer festivals that Tassie does so well, like MOFO and the Cygnet Folk Festival. It also meant my summer gardening efforts were, well, pretty much zero or wasted. I came back to many kilos of broad beans that had to be picked, blanched and frozen immediately. Loads of snow peas. Tonnes of rhubarb. And after that, pretty much just weeds.

So where were we? I had work meetings in California in mid-January, so we managed to fit in 10 days holiday in San Francisco beforehand. It was my first visit to that lovely city and we stayed in an Airbnb right on the Powell-Hyde cable car line and two blocks from the famous Lombard Street. It was enough time to see almost all we wanted to: the Golden Gate Bridge of course, Sausalito, Alcatraz, a hike on Mt Tamalpais, Walt Disney Family Museum, wine tasting in the Napa Valley, hopping on and off historic cable cars and street cars. Then back home for five days and off to Singapore, again for work, but still managed to squeeze in a few sights. It has been great to be home for a few weeks, even though we were both knocked out by some horrible lurgy picked up on the flight back. So now the end of February is rushing up on us, and we are savouring the beautiful summer days and long evenings.

What happened to January

A Funny Thing Happened While I Was Away

A Funny Thing Happened While I Was Away

You may (or may not) have noticed that I didnt post anything last week.  I had planned to do a big master bath reveal and a couple of other smaller projects.  But...I was a little busy.  Craig and I took our youngest daughter to Marlborough, Massachusetts for the USA Hockey National Championships.  In case youre new here - yes, my daughter plays ice hockey.  So, instead of spending time on my laptop all week, I enjoyed watching her compete at the highest level in the nation.  And, Im proud to say that their team finished third.  It was a very fun and exciting week.

On the home front, I was really expecting to see a big drop in page views.  Which was ok.  But instead, I had just the opposite.  Why?  Well, My Orb Chandelier was featured at Better After -

And this was a huge thrill for me - kind of like getting to sit at the popular girls table.  I love Lindseys blog - and her write up was hilarious (as usual). Click the link to her site to see what she wrote - I dont know how she thinks up this stuff!  So thanks Lindsey!

Then, out of nowhere, the great people from Hometalk decided to feature my $10 Headboard on their Facebook page - 

I would like to thank Miriam for featuring my project over there - it was really a great surprise!  If you arent familiar with Hometalk, I highly recommend stopping over there and signing up.  Its a very helpful site which pairs homeowners with home remodeling experts.  You can post questions, get inspired by other projects, or learn how to make repairs to your home.  So, seeing my headboard pop up on my Facebook news feed the other day (of course I follow them) was really cool.

And then...after a long day at the ice rink, I went back to my hotel room, opened my laptop, and saw a huge spike in my numbers.  I couldnt figure out what was going on.  I mean, I hadnt posted anything all week.  Where were all of these readers coming from now?  The Globe and Mail - one of Canadas largest newspapers.  Apparently, the penny will be phased out in Canada this year and they were giving their readers some ideas of what to do with the pennies they had.  One of those ideas?  My Ombre Penny Art - 

How they found my little blog (or this project), Ill never know but Im very happy that they did.  Not only did they send more readers to my blog than anyone else this week, but the story was then picked up by a German newspaper - Die Presse - who also linked my little project.  Wow!  That is pretty cool.  

But those werent the only sites to send readers my way.  My Orb Chandelier was also featured by a number of bloggers this week - Kristin (My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia), Stephanie (My Lil Pumpkin Patch), Kara (Creations by Kara), Michele (Primp), Mindie (Bacon Time), Alison (Stuff and Nonsense), Gail (My Repurposed Life), Jenny (Days of Chalk and Chocolate), Wendy (The Shabby Nest), Candace (Candace Creations), and Allison (A Glimpse Inside).  Thank you so much ladies!  I really appreciate having my project selected!

So, that is how my little blog plugged along all week without me.  But, now Im back and ready to share my master bath before and afters.  Stop back tomorrow to see the transformation!

A Funny Thing Happened While I Was Away