Pinterest Secret Boards: Too little, too late.

UPDATE FOR CLIPBOARD USERS: The service has been acquired by Salesforce.com and will be discontinued from 30th June 2013. Sadface. There's a "what to do now" spiel here, which will take you through the process of preserving and exporting your clips.

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Pinterest has finally launched secret boards, a feature that allows users to create private collections of images they bookmark through the service. Previously, every board you created on Pinterest was public by default, which was a right pain in the hoop if you wanted to use it to plan, y'know, surprise things that you didn't want the world and its granny to know about before the event.

While Pinterest appeared to dither long and hard about whether they'd bother their arses to offer users the one thing they've been crying out for since its launch, I looked elsewhere for my private planning needs. I tried Evernote but missed the visual interface; I tried MikeLike and was delighted that it looked so like Pinterest but missed the mixed media note-taking options that Evernote provided, where I could save my own notes alongside bookmarked links, text, and images.

I try to keep my digital life reasonably streamlined, so although I could have used a combination of Pinterest for public/social sharing, MikeLike for private planning, and Evernote for personal bookmarking, I really wanted to find a single service that could combine the best of all three.

Clipboard, I think, is it.

{some of my Clipboard clips}

{some of my Clipboard boards}

The visual interface means that it looks very Pinterest, but the whole thing is rather more versatile: clips from the Internet can take the form of images, text, or entire pages, you can add and save your own typed notes, and while there is an option to make clips and boards public they're private by default.

I find that I'm less inclined to fall down the rabbit hole of browsing other people's bookmarks on Clipboard than on Pinterest because where Pinterest is all about the pretty, Clipboard feels more like a place to get organised and get things done. 

Anything that helps me to not procrastinate my time away is a winner in my book.

I also like that you Clipboard allows you to create additional boards on the fly by simply adding new hashtags to the clip that's being saved (Pinterest requires that you set up new boards on the site before pinning to them.)

Where Pinterest currently limits secret boards to three per user, there are no such restrictions with Clipboard. Additionally, with Clipboard you can flip-flop between clips being private and public ad infinitum; with Pinterest, it's not possible to make any of your existing boards private, and if you choose to make a secret board public and then change your mind, well, tough. There's no undo.

I'm using both services side-by-side at the moment because it would simply be way too time-consuming to go back through more than a year's worth of stuff on Pinterest and shuffle it across. Pinterest will need to do a lot more than offer three secret boards solely for images to tempt me back full-time, though, and I just wish I'd found Clipboard before I amassed almost 1,500 bookmarks on Pinterest.

PS - this is not a sponsored post, and I've received no payment or perks for writing it. I came across Clipboard while searching for Pinterest alternatives, and it's just impressed me so much that I wanted to tell you about it.

Something for the weekend.

My final set of overlapping visitors went home yesterday so my liver, Boris and I are treating ourselves to a lazy day to recover from an enjoyable week of being very busy indeed. In between all the going we managed to find a new flat and Himself has got himself a cool new job, which is all very exciting!

After my last interiors post you might have expected that the gaff would be totally tricked out for Halloween, but in the end the sum total of my festive decorating was to put a pair of rather different pumpkins on display. 

I carved two lines of perfect chevrons into the back of this one before deciding that they were less fun than a scary face.

This mini white pumpkin, meanwhile, was just too cute in its own right to spoil it with any decoration.

In other news, the blog is seven today. Seven! I can hardly believe it. To celebrate, I'm mostly planning to try one of the new Wild Ombré hair kits from L'Oréal Paris.

Oh, and I might have a few giveaways lined up as a little thank you for reading. Keep an eye on the blog and my Twitter and Facebook pages during this coming blogiversary week to be in with a chance to win x

Liar liar shoes on fire.

Remember how I said last week that I'd no black flats?

Literally the next day a shoebox at the back of the wardrobe made a liar out of me.

I was having a big clear out of stuff to donate when I came across these perfect-for-AW12 beauties:

So apologies for my inadvertent fib, but yay for a pretty great accidental find! And for anyone who doesn't speak shoe, well, it was like discovering a forgotten fifty quid note in the back pocket of an old pair of jeans :)

Oh, did I not mention I was going away?

An organised blogger would probably have let everyone know she was off on holidays and no doubt would then have scheduled a load of posts to auto-publish while she was away, rather than seeming to disappear for a couple of weeks, but regular readers will know that I am not that kind of blogger. (I'd very much like to be that kind of blogger but unless I can squeeze a few more hours into every day or get hold of Hermione Granger's Time-Turner necklace, it's unlikely ever to happen.)

Himself had to go to the States with work (San Francisco one week, then Boston the next) and at the last minute I managed to tag along for the trip. Um, YAY! We spent a couple of days in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, then a couple of days in Yellowstone National Park (I was on edge the whole time, waiting for the place to blow à la 2012) and finished up with a few days in and around Boston.

I am notorious for taking rubbish photos of stupid things when I'm away, but I thought I'd give you a goo at a couple of pics from this trip anyway. Brace yourself for the most random assortment of holiday snaps you're ever likely to see...

first glimpse of the Grand Tetons from the plane

rush hour, Jackson Hole

the closest we came to seeing a bear in Yellowstone

BOOM: Old Faithful geyser (those two almost imperceptible specks to its right are people!)

Grand Prismatic spring, Yellowstone

sunset over Beartooth Pass outside of Cody, Wyoming

super retro cinema ads at the Mendon Twin drive-in, Massachusetts

letting Irish :) breakfast tea brew at the Deluxe Town Diner, Watertown, MA

melting in the 33°C heat and crazy humidity in Salem

windswept en route to the Boston hahbah islands

my only big non-beauty purchase: a grey ombré shower curtain

Thanks a meeellion.

I'm feeling very fancy today, peeps: I discovered this morning that my nails and I have been shortlisted for a Cosmopolitan Blog Award! Thanks so much to everyone who nominated me (I know it was you guys because I'm too morto to enter these things myself and Mam can't work the Internet.)

I'm in the Best Established Beauty Blogger category (see? Fancy!) along with some properly amazing beauty blogs. It's lovely to be recognised and obviously I'm absolutely chuffed to be included in such stellar company.

If you'd like to vote for me, just clicky here.

BREAKING NEWS: I can haz nail shop?

I got some disheartening work news last week which bummed me right out, so I did something that I knew would cheer me up: I painted my nails. Then I started on a set of maritime-themed false nails that my sister asked me to paint for a hen night she has coming up. And when I still wasn't feeling chirpy after doing those, I dug out a few more sets of artificial nails and painted them up with some of my favourite designs.

My idea was that I would frame them and hang them on the gallery wall I'm attempting to create in the living room, but since there's actually only one picture on the "gallery" wall so far and I was still feeling kind of rubbish about my job situation, I decided to go down a different route.

I took some photos of them, uploaded them to Etsy, and opened a little shop there this morning!

I won't be spamming you by going on and on about it but it's a bit exciting and I thought you guys should be the first to know. And if you do decide to get anything, I've set up a worldwide free shipping code - SHIPMEFREE - as a thank you for being amazing x

Talon-tastic Thursday: We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to let off some steam.

(Make yourself a cup of tea - this is going to be a long one.)

Over the last few weeks, a number of eagle-eyed readers have let me know that one of my most popular nail photos was appearing on the Glamour magazine website and on e.l.f. cosmetics' blog without proper accreditation. Most often it's individual, personal bloggers that are guilty of offering "source: Tumblr" or "source: Pinterest" or - my personal favourite - "source: Google" by way of image credit, usually linking to that site's homepage rather than the actual page on which they found the picture.

{my photo}

When hobby bloggers do it, I assume that it's because they're not familiar with intellectual copyright and don't really stop to think about how discourteous it is to post someone else's work without giving them due credit; as far as they're concerned, they're just sharing pretty pictures. This actually happens quite a lot and when you guys spot it and let me know - for which I really can't thank you enough x - I'll usually just leave a comment or drop them a quick email, at which point the vast majority of bloggers have the decency to add full credit and a link.

When it's people who make an actual paid day job of writing for online publications and should therefore know better than to use a photo without (a) checking that they have permission to publish it and (b) providing credit and a link to the verified original online source, well, I really start to see red.

To be fair, Glamour were great about it, immediately updating the article with proper credit and a link to my blog post when I got in touch to let them know that the image was mine.

The response from e.l.f. cosmetics was a little less stellar.

{oh hai, my nailz! screenshot of the original e.l.f. cosmetics blog post}

For several days the company simply ignored repeated attempts to contact them via Twitter and failed to respond to several comments on their blog post pointing out that they'd used my photo. (The very first comment on the blog post is actually from the lovely CherrySue, letting them know the error of their ways!)

When I emailed their director of e-Commerce requesting that they add proper image credit and a link to my original post on both the blog post and their Facebook page - a very simple operation, I think you'll agree - the e.l.f. solution was to have someone paint their nails like mine, take a photo of their paint job, remove my image from the blog, and insert their new photo instead.

{photo credit: e.l.f. cosmetics} 

Given that e.l.f. used my image to help pull in over 800 Facebook likes and garner more than 60 comments between their blog and Facebook page - which I note is about 10 times the activity that they usually enjoy on their posts - I really didn't think that whitewashing me out of the picture when I requested a simple photo credit was really an acceptable solution.

After some more back and forth, e.l.f. ultimately just added the text "This nail look was inspired by a look we saw on Pinterest by Lyndar The Merciless" to the blog post.

{screenshot of the current version of the e.l.f. blog post}

Himself reckons that this muddies the situation even further and that it now looks like the new e.l.f. image is mine; that's what most of the comments, including my own, point to as they reference the original pic.

What a mess. 

As for how they came to use my image in the first place, e.l.f. offered what I'm going to christen the Pinterest defence - "well, our writer found it on Pinterest and it wasn't linked to your blog there" - which, frankly, is no defence at all. Leaving aside for a moment that fact that one of the comments on the pin in question is from someone pointing out that the image is mine and helpfully providing a link to my blog, the e.l.f. writer didn't even cite Pinterest as a source in the original post. My image was simply added as though it was her own.

I now watermark all my nail images but since there are several older versions floating around the Internet, watermark-free, I have no doubt these sorts of incidents will be repeated.

I guess I'll just have to hope that future offenders will be a bit cooler about sorting them than e.l.f. have been.

PS - I not trying to put anyone off Pinterest; I love seeing my nails on inspiration boards. I am delighted with how well-received my nail designs are and am so appreciative of the exposure they get, but seeing them credited improperly or not at all does break my little heart.

What I Wore: Jubilee Weekend edition

When I find an item of clothing that I really, really like, I will wear it to death. Case in point: pretty much everything that I've got on above. You'll no doubt recognise the sequin skirt from last weekend, when I was able to wear it with sheer tops and bare legs.

A daytime temperature drop of 10°C combined with plenty of wind and rain meant that the bank holiday weekend called for rather more substantial pairings.

The grey jumper is from Topshop and it's the perfect slouchy, not sloppy, fine knit with a slight mullet hem and batwing underarms. I've been wearing this non-stop since I got it, too; it's bizarrely flattering AND supremely comfortable. Win win! The grey ribbed tights are from Oasis, bought two years ago, and the chestnut Uggs were an amazing birthday present that I didn't expect to have to pull out in June (!) but they kept my feet toasty and dry.

In which I was basically at the BAFTAs.

The riverside rooftop garden where we spent yesterday afternoon happened to overlook the TV BAFTAs red carpet as well as the Thames, so I got to do a bit of celeb spotting as we were heading home. I recognised Jeremy Piven (Ari in Entourage), Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan, Alexander Armstrong, Lord Grantham/Hugh Bonneville, Emilia Fox, Melissa George, Ruth Jones, Miranda Hart, Tamzin Outhwaite, and Davinia McCall (and even from afar, I was not a fan of her zebra stripe dress/neon stilettos combo.)

I took a handful of quick pap snaps from my remote vantage point:

{Holly Willoughby & Fearne Cotton}

{Amy Childs & entourage}

{Rob Brydon}

I also saw but didn't recognise Robert Sheehan and, um, may have christened him "BAFTA hipster" for this natty choice of outfit.

Our last spot was Dominic West, and impressively enough it was Himself who copped his identity ("It's your man from The Wire") first. And yes, I took a photo. (It is truly terrible; you have been warned.)

{Dominic West's back}

Of all the peeps we saw, only Amy Childs and Dominic West effectively ignored the fans who were positioned around the corner from (and therefore out of sight of) the press pit. Childs at least acknowledged them with one small halfhearted wave as she gave them a wide berth headed straight for the waiting press photographers; Dominic West quite literally trotted past them as he broke into a half run for the red carpet. Bad form! 

{Robert Sheehan image source: Bafta.org}

What I Wore: Weekend Edition

After months of humming and hawwing and adding loads of photos of similar garments to my Pinterest boards, I finally treated myself to Zara's gold sequin skirt on Friday and then proceeded to wear it all weekend.

We spent Saturday afternoon hanging out in the park with Boris. In retribution for the zillion photos I took of him enjoying himself and looking cute, he decided to get his photobomb on.

 

Yesterday we visited the temporary Queen Elizabeth Roof Garden on the top of the Southbank Centre for a late lunch and some Pimm's...

... and a few awkward photos on that unsung catwalk of the underground, the travelator.

I hope you'd a lovely weekend and that your week has gotten off to a good start x

{Skirt: Zara / polka dot top: Glamorous / zebra belt: River Island / gold flip flops: Office / Scottie dog print top: River Island / butterfly belt: Topshop}

Lacy lady.

Even when the temperature's pushing 30°C in London, plenty of girls still manage to look super cool and Fierce With A Capital F in their skinny jeans (or black opaque tights - seriously.)

Sadly, I am not one of them; my (admittedly meagre) attempts at Styling Myself or Putting Together A Look go completely out the window in the heat.

Instead, I've developed a formula which I stick to fairly religiously in very warm weather, as you can see. Dress (Penneys/Primark again) + sandals (eBay, originally from Office) + sunglasses + earrings (because it's too hot for other jewellery) = done!

Today, I mostly wore...

... an aquarium.

I guess Himself's new hobby (which he's blogging about here, fish fans) is having a bigger influence on me than I realised.

The dress is from Penneys/Primark*, it's this season, it's £17 so probably €21 Eurobux, and mine was a present from Mam. (Thanks Mam x) The skirt of it is lined and it fits true to size.

The bronze flip flops are from New Look from a couple of years ago, and while I know you can't see my toenails I feel obliged to tell you that they're black with gold studs and look totally kickass.

* I know, I know. Blogger in wearing Primark shocker, eh?

My day in Instagram.

{Boris & friend; today's weather}

{flowers at Spitalfields}

{a dedicated umbrella & stick store in Holborn; St. Paul's}

{wall of OPI love in the new John Lewis beauty hall; sausage dogs as Ted Baker wallet clasps}

You know how some people have amazing and occasionally inspiring Instagram feeds? Yeah... As you can see, I'm really not one of them!

If anyone needs me, I'll mostly be here.

"Here" being my hotel balcony in Tenerife! Not too shabby, eh? I'm on holidays at the minute, as you will have gathered by now, and before that I was in a total flap about packing for holidays, which is why things have been a bit quiet on the blogging front lately.

I believe the weather is pure awful in the UK and Ireland so I'll try to squeeze some sun into my suitcase for the return journey, and normal blog service will resume next week x

The Reluctant Bride says hello.

I don't intend to turn this into a wedding blog; I couldn't have given a toss about other people's weddings up until last October and I'm sure lots of you are the same! However as it's sure to take up a lot of my headspace in the coming months, I hope you'll put up with me as I introduce an occasional series where I share my take on the experience. 

I used to think they were complete mentalers but since getting engaged, I have actually become quite jealous of women who have spent their whole lives dreaming about their wedding day. It has to be easier than spending your every waking moment (and some sleeping ones, too) being dead set against convention in general and weddings in particular for the guts of 30 years only to have your lovely very long-term boyfriend become your new fiancé in the flash of a sparkly ring.

I feel completely at sea, somewhere in the middle of an ocean more terrifying than the Atlantic in a blow-up dinghy with one oar while the sort of towering waves last seen in The Perfect Storm threaten to crash in on top of me and spill me into the waiting arms of a giant Kraken. 

Not being in a position to whip out a shoebox or scrapbook crammed with the building blocks of my ideal wedding as soon as the diamond dropped, I am watching copious amounts of Four Weddings and Don't Tell The Bride and - very gingerly - dipping my toe into wedding websites in an attempt to get acquainted with that world so that I don't have to breathe into a paper bag every time I think about mine.

I have even gone so far as to try on a couple of dresses!

So far, in spite of my epic bravery, I have made exactly no progress. Although I have managed to rule out both the wedding dresses I tried on, so I suppose that's something. 

{the offending garments}

As for venues or what sort of day we want, neither of us have very much of a clue at the moment (and as an emigré whose pragmatic best girlfriend is the other side of the world in Oz, I am not relishing the prospect of planning what will probably be a wedding in Ireland from London.)

I have suggested a Wiccan ceremony, for the purpose of enjoying Mam's total horror at the idea, but I do long for something a bit different - actually genuinely different, as opposed to the girls on reality TV who use the word to describe the princess/fairytale/cookie cutter days they're planning - that's a good reflection of our tastes and what we enjoy.

At least Himself is interested in the gig, unlike some grooms who ban the "w" word post-engagement - if you don't want to hear about wedding planning, guys, DON'T PROPOSE!!! - and since he's actually been giving the whole thing quite a bit of thought and organised wedding fairs and run wedding receptions in a previous job, he probably has a better handle on the whole thing than I do.

Especially since my current idea of getting organised mostly involves sticking random wedding pictures that I quite like onto a virtual pinboard.

Well, I do have 30 years of wedding scrapbooking to catch up on...