Introduction

Clipboard is a tool that helps you save and organize your favorite pieces of the web. Here are some examples:

Basically, you save clips with our "clipper" and the clips appear in your clipboard.com home page. You can install the clipper on any modern browser by following the directions at our start page.

What you do after saving a clip is entirely up to you. You can publish your clips (at clipboard.com or virtually any other destination); you can share your clips with a small group of people in or out of clipboard.com; or, you can organize your clips with tags and annotations to make them more accessible and appealing to others. It's entirely up to you.

This deceptively small menu of actions allows you to carry out any number of scenarios: privately researching a problem, jointly collaborating on a project, or publicly curating around a specific theme. Our hope is that you'll find Clipboard to be a valuable part of your search and browse experience. Please let us know what you think by sending us feedback.

Clipboard Basics

There are basically four things that you can do with a clip: create, organize, share, and discover.

Creating Clips

Creating clips is easy with our clipper, which you can use on any website by launching it from your bookmark bar (as you would a regular link).

When activated, the clipper temporarily changes the behavior of your mouse showing you the region that it thinks you are interested in. Move the mouse to select a different region or click to confirm the selection.

You can scroll your mousewheel up and down to grow or shrink your selection. This technique is especially helpful if you are trying to grab an entire row from a table.

If you are still having trouble clipping the exact content you want, then you may want to try dragging your mouse to select a broad but specific region.

We have a clipping tutorial that goes over these basic interactions, so please check it out if you find that you need more help.

Organizing Clips

After you've created a clip, you can annotate it with text as well as hash tags (words that are prefixed with the hash symbol, as in "#example"). Your annotations will be searchable along with the full text of the clip. If you end up sharing your clips, others may add comments below your annotation.

Tags are special in that they introduce new ways for you to organize your clips, especially clips that you publish. More specifically, if your username on Clipboard is "SportsFan", you publish some clips, and you occasionally tag clips with "#baseball", then we make the following two URLs for you:

http://www.clipboard.com/SportFan
http://www.clipboard.com/SportFan/baseball

The first URL is all of your published clips that other Clipboard users can see, while the second is your published clips tagged with "#baseball".

Sharing Clips

There are several ways that you can share clips with others. The best way to share depends on the circumstances and who you want to share with.

Sharing with a few Clipboard users — Making an @mention to a few people in the annotation field (e.g., "@bob and @sue") will place a clip in the shared spaces of the users that you mention (and alert them via email if their alert setting allow for that).

Sharing with all Clipboard users — If you toggle the publish icon for a clip (turning it from to ) then all users of clipboard.com can potentially see the clip from the feeds section.

Broadly sharing outside of Clipboard — The external sharing menu allows you to share clips through Facebook, Twitter, Email, or even embed them within your own web site. Remember, when you share in this way, everyone in the world will be able to see the clip.

Narrowly share outside of Clipboard — If you want someone without a Clipboard account to be able to see a clip, you can always send the permalink, which you can copy from the share menu or access from the permalink icon . But remember, once you share the permalink, anyone who knows the permalink can access the clip even if the clip is private.

Browsing Clips

The Clipboard website is divided into three sections that correspond to the the three tabs:

Home — All clips that you created or reclipped, public or private.
Shared — All clips that you've shared or have been shared with you.
Feeds — Public clips by others, including your subscribed feeds.

In any of the three modes, you can use the search box to find specific clips based on title, content, hash tags or mentions. The filters in the top bar will also be helpful things down when you need to.

In the same are as the filters is a view toggle that you can use to change the appearance of clips. "Item" view shows the clip in its entirety and allows you to take any possible action on a clip. "List" view is also fully functional, but only shows the text of a clip instead of the full visuals. "Tile" view shows your a cropped version of the clip and is nice when you want to visually scan many clips at once.

Frequently Asked Questions

Browser Setup

Where is the favorites/bookmarks bar in my browser?

To show the bookmark bar in Google Chrome, select the Always Show Bookmarks Bar option in the Settings → Bookmarks menu.

To show the bookmark bar in Firefox, select Bookmarks Toolbar from the View → Toolbars menu.

For Safari, select Show Bookmarks Bar from the View menu.

In Internet Explorer 8 or 9, select the Favorites Bar option from the View → Toolbars menu. If the menus aren't visible, press Alt once to show them.

I'm using IE7 or older, can I still use Clipboard?

Sorry, but no. Currently, Clipboard is only tested on IE8+, as well as Chrome, Firefox and Safari. We strongly recommend using Chrome or Firefox on Windows, or Chrome or Safari on Mac OSX with Clipboard.

I'm using Opera, can I use Clipboard?

Clipboard works in Opera 11.5, but it is not fully tested. Use at your own risk.

What browser do you recommend for using Clipboard?

Clipboard looks and works best in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. We strongly encourage you to upgrade to one of these browsers if you're not already using one.

Do you have a mobile app?

Not yet, but we're looking at it. You should be able to view clips on the most modern mobile / tablet browsers (including iPhone and iPad).

Using the Clipper

How come the clipper won't let me login?

The clipper expects third party cookies to be enabled on your browser. This allows us to query our site to determine if you have already logged in. Having third-party cookies enabled is the default option in all browsers. If they are not enabled, you can enable them by following these instructions:

Enabling third-party cookies on Google Chrome

Navigate to chrome://settings/content
Uncheck Block third-party cookies from being set

Enabling third-party cookies on Firefox

Open up the Preferences dialog
- On Mac: Firefox → Preferences
- On Windows: Firefox → Options → Options
- On Linux: Edit → Preferences
Go to the Privacy tab, and check Accept third-party cookies

Enabling third-party cookies on Internet Explorer

Open up the Internet Options dialog
- Tools → Internet Options
Go to the Privacy tab, click on the Advanced button, and check the Accept radio button under Third-party Cookies.

Enabling third-party cookies on Safari

Open up the Preferences dialog
- Safari → Preferences
Go to the Privacy tab and check the Never radio button next to Block Cookies.

What if I can't get the Clipper to highlight what I want to clip?

Try using the mouse wheel to grow or shrink the selection, or click and drag to highlight larger section of the page.

I tried to launch the bookmarklet but nothing happened…

Try refreshing the page and clicking on the Clipboard bookmarklet button again. If you still see nothing, then shoot us an email at support@clipboard.com, as it's possible we have a bug. We try to test as thoroughly as possible, but there are a lot of browsers and webpages out there and we might not work on some of them.

I clipped a webpage but the clipping looks incorrect…

On any clip, you can mark the clip broken. This option is available on the flag option of a clip. We regularly examine broken clips and use them to improve how the clipper works.

Actions on Clips

How do I delete a clip?

On each clip, there are a set of controls at the bottom of the clip. On the right side is the Trash Can icon (), which will permanently delete a clip.

How do I make a clip private?

By default all clips are private. Unless you explicitly set a clip as published, share it through a link, or mention another Clipboard user, nobody will be able see your clips.

How do I publish a clip so that anyone can see it?

If you click on the publish icon in the clip controls, that will make the clip visible to anyone.

How do I share a clip with another Clipboard user?

if you mention another user (ex: @username) in the annotation, the clip will automatically become visible to that user. When you mention a user in this way, they can see clips that are not published.

How can I organize and classify or tag my clips?

You can tag any clip in the annotation box using the hash (#) character. Any tags (ex: #cars #cooking #receipts) will be searchable in your home page.

Finding Clips

When I search on Clipboard, what am I searching over?

If you look at the upper-left corner, just below our company logo, you will see a simple description of the set of clips that you are currently looking at. The Home tab is labeled "Your Personal Home" while the Feeds tabs is labeled "Your Feeds View".

This label is the set of clips that any search with be scoped over. Hence, if the Home tab is open, then you searches are over your clips. But note the next question, which describes some interesting special cases.

Are there special URLs on Clipboard?

Yes! These are the four special URL types:

http://www.clipboard.com/USERNAME
http://www.clipboard.com/USERNAME/TAG
http://www.clipboard.com/tag/TAG
http://www.clipboard.com/site/SITE

Respectively, these correspond to all published clips from a user, all published clips from a user with a specific tag, all published clips with a specific tag, and all published clips from a specific domain. A search from these pages will be scoped to only those clips that would belong on the page.

How do I navigate to a user, tag, or site page on Clipboard?

Every clip contains the user that clipped it and the site that is the clip source. Moreover, the annotation may also contain tags supplied by the user. Clicking on any of these links will bring you to the page dedicated to that user, site, or tag. However, the USERNAME/TAG variant can only be accessed today if you explicitly navigate to it from the URL entry form of your browser.

What are the things displayed below the search box?

These are nothing more than search suggestions. Today, search suggestions are simply the most frequently appearing concepts on the page that you are looking at. We'll probably make this more sophisticated and useful in the future.

Account Settings

Your account settings can be viewed and modified at your Profile & Settings page by clicking on the gear icon, or selecting "Profile & Settings" from the main menu (both located on the upper-right).

How do I change my password?

From Profile & Settings / "edit profile" click the "Change Password" button.

How do I hide/show the clipping preview?

From Profile & Settings / "edit profile" toggle the "Show preview before saving" check box. Be sure to click the "Save Changes" button when you are done.

If the preview is actually open, simple check the box labeled "Don't show this popup anymore" in the lower-left corner.

Where can I change my notifications?

From Profile & Settings / "edit profile", check the boxes consistent with how you would like us to alert you. Be sure to click the "Save Changes" button when you are done.

How do I find others on Clipboard?

From Profile & Settings, select "connect". On this page you can connected your Clipboard account with your Facebook account and hopefully find Facebook friends that are on both systems.

We will add more ways to find others in the near future.

Can I log in with Facebook or Twitter?

Right now, we do not support sign-on with either system, but we will add this capability before we come out of Beta.

Where can I see old notifications?

You can access your old notifications through the main menu by selecting "Notifications".

What does it mean to follow someone (or something) on Clipboard?

Following someone (or something) simply means that if you were to select "followed clips" from the feeds page (instead of "newest clips") you would only see clips related to those users, sites, or tags that you follow.

How do I follow someone or something?

You can follow someone or something in two ways. First, if you are on a user, site, or tag page (which you can get to by clicking on a the user, tag, or site links on a clip), there should be a "Follow" button on the upper left.

If you connect your Clipboard account with your Facebook account, you can also choose to follow / unfollow those Clipboard users that are also among your Facebook friends.

Finally, the feeds page has a link labeled "edit feeds" which brings you to the section of your Profile & Settings page where you can edit all of your feeds.

Etiquette

Is there any content that I shouldn't clip?

We really want to leave this up to you. We insist that you only use Clipboard for legal purposes. We would also ask that you be sensitive to others. But if you are privately clipping legal content, then it's none of our business.

Is there content that I shouldn't publish?

We intend for the feeds page to be effectively PG-13. We want it to be family friendly and safe for work. But we also recognize that people have different standards, so to make it simple we will explicitly ask that you not publish any clip with nudity, hate speech, or content designed to be offensive or disturbing.

We really don't want to be community police, so we ask that you simply use common sense and if you are unsure if a clip is okay to publish, then you probably shouldn't.

What should I do if I see content that I don't like?

The flag menu on each clip allows you to flag a clip as inappropriate. We will examine the clip in question and if we agree with you we will remove it from the feeds page (but not delete it from the user's home unless there is a legal reason for us to do so).

Can I advertise on Clipboard with my clips?

Absolutely not. If you clip and publish with the intent of driving commercial traffic to your site, we will shutdown your account. Moreover, if you spam our users by @mentioning users that you don't know, we will disable your account.

What other community guidelines do you have?

Be respectful in comments (especially if they are public). When you publish a clip, ask yourself "Will other people like this?". Other than that, have fun.