Major new version of Nifty Slideshows released - V3.0

In a nutshell

• hugely improved autopost blog support
• save your settings
• better notes explaining what's going on
• improvements to layout, a bit of re-jigging 

Try Nifty Slideshows V3.0 for yourself.

Reason for update

Anyone who follows this blog knows that I develop Zazzle promo tools, mainly for my own purposes. But I also know that loads of Zazzlers find them useful, too, so I try to make them as user friendly as possible whilst keeping their power and flexibility.

A major update to Nifty Slideshows was in the offing anyway - making it a bit more understandable and re-jigging the layout a bit at the same time. But those weren't important enough to deserve an update by themselves.

Well, in the last few weeks I've been spending a fair amount of time pinning loads of linked slideshows on Pinterest. But I needed variation.

Variation needed in promoting, so...

You see, I know that variation is important in my promoting on Pinterest, so what next? Well, the obvious thing was pinning products instead of whole slideshows. With this in mind, I saw that in essence, it's exactly the same as for linked slideshows - except for a few tweaks. And Nifty Slideshows is a great tool already to actually get a bunch of just/mostly the products you want in your face.

So I made a new version that included a feature specifically to help with it. It ended up just being some tweaks to how it was already letting you send linked slideshows to autopost blogs.

This is a screenshot of the relevant section, as tweaked to allow you to send a product to an autopost blog.

Streamlining autopost support

You can see there's now a check box to allow you to choose to send products instead of linked slideshows and also somewhere to put the secret email address for the autopost blog.

You can also see some buttons that let you whiz through the products in the slideshow, only pausing when you want to send one that you like. This saves you having to scroll up to the slideshow each time - a right pain on mobile.

New: Save your settings

Another tweak, essential to regulars. Now you can save your settings to make it easier next time. Just bookmark the link in the page footer.

Why is that so cool?

If you're serious about maximising your promotion reach while minimising your time spent doing it, then this feature lets you set up, say, a spreadsheet or a text file and keep your settings links in there, one for each autopost blog. Saves having to remember the secret email addresses and search settings for what each owner wants shared on their blog.

That's pretty much it. For the curious, read the next bit about scheduling using autopost blogs and IfThisThenThat

How I do scheduling

To be accurate, I wasn't actually pinning them but scheduling them to be pinned. That explains the need to be able to post to my autopost blogger blogs - so I could use their scheduling features. For this to work, I had to choose the option to put emailed posts into draft in each blog's setup.

I then set up an IfThisThenThat recipe for each. The recipes are set up to do the actual pinning for me automatically, once any scheduled blog posts are published.

So I email a bunch, go to the relevant Blogger blog, look at the draft posts and then one by one schedule when I want them posted. When one is published, the relevant IfThisThenThat recipe sees it the next time it looks, and pins it to the board I chose in its setup.