StumbleUpon: Beyond The “Stumble” Button

There’s more to using StumbleUpon than just clicking the Stumble button and landing on random web pages. How do you think the pages ended up in their index in the first place? Someone had to submit them first.

Don’t just Stumble. Submit pages, review them, tag them. Do more than just channel-surf, contribute to the community.

Submitting

Keep the StumbleUpon toolbar ready when you browse the web normally. Find something you like? Click the Thumbs-up button, like you do when you’re using the Stumble button. If someone else already submitted the page, it will just fade to gray when you click it, and that’s all. You’ve added another vote to the page. If you’re the first to discover the page, a new window will open with a form to fill-out.

Clean-up the Title field, if it’s full of extraneous rubbish. You just want the post/page title here, not the site’s name, or anything. Next, write a couple sentences about the page in the Review box. While you can get away with leaving the Review field blank, I highly recommend filling it out. Select the most appropriate topic, and hit the Submit This Site button.

Reviewing

If you go to yourusername.stumbleupon.com, you will be presented with your StumbleUpon blog (or StumbleBlog as I call it). Every review you leave will be shown here, along with a link to the page you reviewed. This means your friends can see what you like online, and it makes it easy for you to find things you Liked in the past.

How do you leave a review? If you’re submitting a site, then there’s a prominent Review field ready, but what if you’re just another up-voter? The toolbar has a word-bubble-shaped icon that, when clicked, takes you to a page that lists all the review of a page. In addition to seeing what others said about the page, you can leave your own review. Get in the habit of reviewing pages you and may want to come back to, or you think others may be interested in.

Tagging

The toolbar has yet another icon, shaped like a price tag. By clicking this, you can add a few tags to a page.

Tags define a page, making it possible to do neat tricks, like only Stumbling pages with a certain tag.

You don’t need to go crazy, tagging every page in sight, but this is yet another thing that may help you, or someone else, find the page again.

Channels

StumbleUpon is often compared to idly flipping through channels on a television. If you use StumbleUpon’s Channels feature, it’s more like flipping through a years worth of shows on a single TV channel.

Make sure either Channels, or the tidier Channels Menu, is turned-on in your Toolbar Options. By selecting a channel, you can Stumble through pages that are only from The Onion, only from Wikipedia, only from YouTube, only in the Internet Tools topic, etc.

Send To

Pretty much web user has, at some point or another, emailed a link to someone they know. It’s a bit fo a hassle, though. You have to copy the URL, trek over to your email client, start a new message, paste the URL in, and write a short note to explain why you’re sending the link.

StumbleUpon can help you here. By enabling the Send Top feature in the Options window, you can easily share pages via a convenient menu. Your StumbleUpon friends are automatically in the list, and you can send to any email you want. Your friend will receive an email from StumbleUpon containing your username and the link (as well as a big “Pass it on button”).

StumbleUpon has a lot of features that are overlooked by many users. Check-out all the buttons on the toolbar, and poke around in the Toolbar Options screen. See what SU has to offer.