Ravelry Tidbits

Do you keep up with the changes to Ravelry?

There’s a new Ravelry Newswire feed that will let you see all of the various sources where changes are posted. Some changes were being posted on Twitter, some on Facebook, some in the Ravelry changelog, and some in the Site Announcements thread in the “For Love of Ravelry” group. This combines all of them, so if you subscribe to the feed, you’ll get everything in one place.

A great change that went into place about a month ago is that there is now a way to get email notifications when you receive a Ravelry message. From your Ravelry message box, click the “email settings” tab to configure what kind of messages you want notifications for, and the email address you want to use.

A few months ago, a “Wish List” was added for patterns that are available for download through Ravelry. If you queue an item that has a Ravelry download, the pop-up window has a checkbox for “Include this Ravelry Download PDF on my wish list”:

Once you add patterns to your wishlist, you’ll get an additional tab in your queue that looks like this:

Clicking on the Wish List tab will show your list of desired patterns. Of course, you can view other people’s Wish Lists as well, and there’s a link to buy the pattern as a gift for that person. I hope they expand this to include books, yarn, needles, etc. – it would be great just to use it as a way to track certain items you want, but don’t want to buy right away for some reason. Then if you came across a great sale on knitting books (or needles, or whatever), you could look at your Wish List to remind yourself what you wanted to get. And of course, it’s great for gift-giving, too.

One thing I’ve always wanted was a way to neatly print my Ravelry projects. Although I don’t know of any way to do this within Ravelry itself (if there is, please let me know!), I do have a good work around. I installed the “Screengrab” add-on for Firefox, which lets me save or copy a web page as an image. The neat part is that you can save just the part of the page in your browser window, the entire page, a particular frame, etc. Images can be saved in .jpg or .png format, or you can copy and paste the image into an image editing program. Now I just go to my Ravelry projects and use Screengrab to save the entire page as a .png file — then I can just print the image file. Installing the Screengrab add-in will put a little blue-and-yellow icon in the lower right corner of your browser window. Click it to bring up the options:

Are there any other nifty little Ravelry tips you know about and want to share?