There's been so much going on behind the scenes here at Craftster that we've barely had a moment to tell you about all the fun new features that have been added recently! Nothing here is earth shattering, necessarily, but they should all be really great new ways to make Craftster more usable and more inviting.
Search using tags as suggestions
You may have noticed as you go to type something into the search area that there's a new little drop down trying to suggest things to you! We're pulling all of our tags as suggestions of things you might be searching for. This actually doesn't mean that the search will be for items with that tag... You'll still be getting threads that have those words in the thread but this is a great way to get down to what you're looking for faster!
Don't worry about those commas and underscores, either. The search is smart enough to take those out when it's searching!
See? Here's my results for "pirate, hat,"
New Advanced Search features
I've always thought
Advanced Search was pretty great, but now it's even greater! We've added four quick select categories to help you find exactly what you're looking for, fast!
You can choose to search for just finished projects (ie all of our Completed Projects boards!), just craft-related discussion (ie all of our Discussion and Questions boards!), just swap boards and challenges (ie All the swaps, swap galleries, and challenges!), or just non-crafty discussion and local boards (ie the boards related to Craftster like the News and Craftster Itself, plus all of the City Guides boards!)
So say I want to find all of the octopus crafts posted. I can just search for them by typing octopus in the search bar and deselecting everything except "search finished projects"! Oh wait! Actually maybe I'm looking for fellow craft fanatics in my area! I can type in Chicago and deselect everything except "search non-crafty discussion and local boards"! Oh no actually I want to see all of the One Tiny Thing swaps.... Easy, fun, and functional!!
You can still go in and manually select and deselect boards instead if you like but this is a great way to get right down to the areas you need.
Add tags when posting a thread
Because tags are so useful to finding the content you want, we want to encourage you to add them to threads right away! You can now do that when you're creating a new thread!!
Underneath the area where you type your message but before the photo insert area should be a box that says "Tags (optional)". You can see here that I've started to type out what I think is a relevant tag and the system will automatically give me a list of tags that already exist! It will suggest the first 15 tags that could match. You can just select an existing tag and it will pop into place OR just type out what you want and hit enter.
You can add
lots of tags if you like! Just remember our rules for tagging!
Tips:
• These tags are public are meant to be useful for everyone!
• When typing a tag, a drop down menu will appear beneath your entry giving you all possible matches to your entry. If you see the tag you want in the list, please select it.
• Please use the singular form of words and phrases unless the word or phrase is typically plural (ie, glasses, pants, etc).
• There's no need to enter super-obvious tags. For example, if a project is posted in the crochet board, it does not need to be tagged with the word crochet. The best tags to enter are those that indicate the unique theme or feature of this project.
• Spaces in tags are allowed and they will be converted to underscores. No other puncuation is allowed. Example: Charlie's Angels would be entered as charlies angels and stored as charlies_angels.
• Only swap galleries with very specific themes should be themes should be tagged. For instance, the Owl swap would be tagged "owl" but the Forest Friends swap would not be tagged. Swap discussions should not be tagged.
(This is not currently available when you modify a post.)Threads you might like
You might have noticed some new additions to the end of all of our threads. We've added a "Threads you might like" feature! This will pull 5 additional threads that you might be interested in looking at based on the thread you're currently in.
If the thread you're looking at doesn't have any tags, you'll just get a selection of the latest threads from the board you're in, like this:
But this is what you get on the exact same thread immediately after adding a tag (this one was "pirate"! fun!):
You'll get a selection of threads based on what tags are on the thread you're in if they're there, which means if you're looking at a pirate costume for example, you can see a treasure chest made of a toilet paper roll, an embroidered treasure map, a striped pirate hat, a jolly roger cake, and a peg-legged eye patch wearing elephant!
And what happens if the threads you're being shown don't have images? Well then you get to look at these corky cuties!
Tutorials Portal
The biggest new thing is our Tutorials portal!! You may have noticed that the tape measure got changed up a bit... See that circle? That circle over the word TUTORIALS?!?!
Well this is why! Our Tutorials Portal a brand new way to view and stay up to date on the latest tutorials all around Craftster. We will be adding new threads here as soon as we're made aware of them. Most of the time they'll be added here BEFORE they're added to their
Tutorial Lists, so keep your eyes peeled here first!
The main Tutorials page will list the three most recently added tutorials at the top and the three most recently added for every category in the list underneath.
Just look at all those categories!!
You can also access our most recently added videos from the main tutorials page but stay tuned as soon this will move away from our current set up and direct you to our more frequently updated
Youtube Channel!
Plus, if you click on any of the categories on the main Tutorials page you'll be taken to a page featuring every single tutorial for that category! Again the three most recently added will be at the top and the full list is underneath.
On any of the featured tutorials at the tops of these pages you can either click "Read more" to go directly to the tutorial, or "reply" if you just can't wait to start talking!
We hope you like these awesome new ways to enjoy Craftster!
Show Images
I name all my skeins after birds!
), firestar, and tussah silk. I spun it up keeping the colors of the batt together and then navajo plied so they'd stay together. It's 65 yards.
)
If I'd had more time I definitely would've gone out and got more black polyester thread.
