Unraveled

This is more of an advanced tip.
The crocheted Obi-Wan is by Lepida!

You may have seen these little orange icons in various places on Ravelry. These are links to RSS feeds, which are documents that automatically update with new photos, notes and other content whenever certain types of information are added to the site. All kinds of other web sites and apps can take advantage of these updates. We provide them for your projects, your friends activity, forum threads and boards, new FOs on pattern pages, new for-sale stash, and more…

I’ve started a thread in For the Love of Ravelry where I’m hoping people will share how they are making use of the feeds that we provide. If you are finding our RSS useful or fun on any way, please stop in and let everyone know what you are doing with it.

Here it is: http://www.ravelry.com/discuss/for-the-love-of-ravelry/topics/2833907

One simple thing you can do is install an RSS reader app on your tablet or phone so that you can easily flip through updates. Hopefully some people will share the names of their favorite apps in the thread that I started.

Another neat tool that you can use with RSS is If This Then That (ifttt.com). This site lets you glue sites, apps and email together so that changes in one place can cause something to happen on the other. Here are some cool things things that you could do with your RSS feeds and IFTTT:

• Receive a text message when a certain colorway of a yarn that you need becomes available for trade or sale.
• Automatically post a status update to Facebook whenever you queue a new project.
• Tweet from a special account any time a new thread is started in your local knitting group’s board.
• Receive an email when a new finished object appears for a new pattern that you’ve had your eye on