Sharing updated

If you follow me on Social Media, you know that I can be noisy at times, particularly from 5-6 in the morning. The rest of the house is still asleep and I use the opportunity to read and learn things. Ultimately, it will end up in my Flipboard collection.

I started a new one for 2023 and it’s here. If you’re interested, there are a number of collections that I’ve worked at over the years.

Sometimes, I’ll read and try to understand as I hit an article. Other times, I’ll move on, knowing that I’ve got the resources tucked away and can get back to them at any time.

In the beginning, I would copy/paste the URL to any resource that I wanted. It was time-consuming but it was the only game in town. Fortunately, many websites have a share button on them to speed up the process. This blog has one – please share any of my posts that you find easily.

The problem with share buttons, in my world anyway, is that there is no standard way to position them within an article. Sometimes, they’re at the top; sometimes they’re at the bottom; sometimes they’re on the side of the page.

It is important to me that I share to Twitter, Facebook, and then my Flipboard account. I was inspired years ago by David Warlick who mused that it’s unproductive to learn something and then keep it to yourself. If you found it useful, chances are there are others that will as well. They always have the option of muting or unfollowing you or just skipping over content that they don’t like.

I ended up taking control of sharing things myself. I installed the Shareaholic extension in every browser that I use. It took care of things nicely and I added the services that were important to me. If I find something that I want to share, it’s just a right-click and a move to the service where I want to share the article.

The only hiccup came when I created my Mastodon account. There was no option to share with that service.

So, I went looking and ended up with AddtoAny.

There are lots of similar services there but AddtoAny shares to Mastodon as well. It was just what I was looking for.

Grudgingly, I made the switch. It was like abandoning an old friend but I’m trying to create a learning network on Mastodon.

How about you? How do you share things? Do you have a philosophy to share with others like David did?