Recently, I’ve declared my love for Pinterest and how I’m enjoying the Google Reader Next button. These are both great fun online, but sometimes you need a few extra tools to make your online experience everything it could be.

On Pinterest, I’ve been seeing a lot of pins that people have uploaded to their boards from their computers, so there’s no attribution and no one knows where it came from. We all have folders on our computers full of random images from the pre-Pinterest days, but I know a lot of us have been hesitant to pin them because the want to give credit where credit is due. Enter TinyEye Reverse Image Search. Upload a picture to TinyEye, and it will help you figure out where it came from. It works brilliantly, and I’ve used it to pin some of my inspiration pics.

Are you annoyed by partial feeds from blogs that you subscribe to? As Fadra over at Social Dialect says, “I didn’t partially subscribe. Don’t partially deliver.” But what if you just can’t get around that partial feed? Now there’s a way. Full Text RSS Feed will give you those full feeds! Just plug in the feed link to the blog that won’t give it all up, click submit, and Full Text RSS Feed gives you a new link to subscribe to that will deliver the full feed of the blog you want to read. I’m not sure what kind of magic they have to get this to work, but it works.

Want to do all sorts of photo editing? Don’t want to pay for Photoshop? Don’t feel like installing GIMP? Check out Pixlr, an online photo editor that’s free and uses layers like the pros do (I’ve never figured out the layer thing) but also has a whole bunch of easy one-click special effects as well.

That’s all I’ve got for now. What sort of cool things have you found online?

I think most people who have been reading blogs for awhile are familiar with the use of a blog reader. For those who aren’t, a reader is a place where you can subscribe to updates from your favorite blogs (and other websites as well) and read them all in one place. It’s much better than chasing down all the sites you want to read to see if they have an update.

For years, I’ve been using Google Reader. It’s pretty darn good, and even has features that let you categorize, publicize and share the items in your reader. I haven’t tried any other readers, and I wouldn’t want to. I have my reader set up to read the oldest item first, and when I’m done it tells me so.

Then I came across a way to make my blog reading experience even better – the Google Next bookmark button.

I’m going to let you read this post on Whoorl because it says everything I want to say about the Google Next button, but better.

I immediately installed the button and have been using it ever since. Here’s what I like about it:

• It lets me read the blog post the way the blogger intended it, which is on their blog
• It makes commenting and pinning easier, since I don’t have any extra clicks
• I will have a better sense of who each blogger is, since the generic Google Reader layout doesn’t allow for personalization
• I actually read more rather than skim, but at the same time I get through everything quicker

And there are a few things I don’t like:

• The button brings me to the absolute newest item in my reader. I like to read the oldest first, and if I’m behind or the blogger has items that should be read in chronological order, I can’t do that. It’s a small inconvenience but nothing I can’t live with.
• If a blog happens to be down or unavailable at the time I try to read it, I can’t read it. But I find that having my iGoogle page up, which has the Google Reader widget front and center, helps since the item will be readable from there. The pictures are still unavailable in this situation, though. Again, small inconvenience, but I found a way around it.
• I have no way of knowing how many blogs are left in my reader without refreshing iGoogle in a separate tab. Being the kind of person who hates not knowing where I’m at, this probably bothers me the most.

Overall, I’d say the whole Next button is a plus. Go check it out – go to your reader, click on Manage Subscriptions, then click on the Goodies tab. Drag the Next button to your bookmarks toolbar. And while you’re at it, drag the Subscribe button there as well. It will save you having to figure out how to subscribe to your favorite blogs.

I’ve been sucked into a black hole of digital eye candy.

Have you heard of Pinterest? It’s a website that lets you pin things to a virtual pinboard, which you can use as inspiration, reference, share with others, and waste more time than you ever thought possible. I’m talking the kind of time you wasted when you first discovered the internet.

At first I resisted getting sucked into yet another site to keep up with. I just didn’t need it, I said. But I kept seeing other people’s pinboards and thought about it. No, I have Tumblr, I said. But Pinterest lets you visually categorize things. I’m a visual person. And suddenly I wanted one.

Since Pinterest is still invite-only, I clicked the button on their site and waited. And waited. It seemed like my invite would never come, but a week later, as I was trying to wrap up my internet surfing so I could go to bed, I checked my email and there it was. My invite. My bedtime flew out the window as I quickly got to setting up my account and started pinning things with reckless abandon.

The cool thing about Pinterest is that you can follow other people’s boards – either an individual board or everything they pin, and you can repin their pins or comment on them. You can also tag people when describing your pins and use hashtags, which work exactly as they do on Twitter. It makes it way easier to feed the addiction, that’s for sure.

I’ve been spending way too much of my time online browsing through any pinboards I can find. Mine are here. Do you have a Pinterest yet?