A Thank You and a Giveaway CLOSED

I usually do only one giveaway a year to celebrate the New Year, but I’ve reached a few blog milestones and wanted to spread around a little love.  The Vintage Traveler has reached 500 followers, I’ve passed 200 followers on Bloglovin’ and I just noticed that I have 100 plus followers on Instagram.   I also recently passed 800 followers on Twitter and I’m closing in on 700 likes on Facebook.  Thanks to all who boost my ego daily by reading , commenting, following…

I was lucky enough to find another copy of Amy de la Hay’s excellent book, Chanel, which I reviewed a few weeks ago.  To have a chance at winning the book, all you have to do is post in the comments that you want to be entered.  The giveaway to open to everyone, worldwide.  It will be open until Monday, November 11, at 6 pm EST.

So many of us feel overwhelmed by “social media” and the feeling that we must keep up with the latest thing on the internet.  The problem is that it all takes time.  I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to have priorities, and just use what works for me.   I find Twitter to be a quick and easy way to keep up with the news and with fashion and museum happenings.  And while Facebook might serve the same purpose, I just don’t find it to be so easy to use.  Knowing that Facebook filters out my posts and the posts of others makes it much less valuable to me as a source of information.

My relationship with Pinterest is of the love/hate variety.  I’m still bothered by the copyright issues associated with the random pinning of other people’s work.   On the other hand, it is great exposure for people who are selling, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve bought things after seeing them on Pinterest.  But some days it just seems like so many pretty pictures, all removed from any context that would give them meaning.  Not that I don’t love pretty pictures.  I find Pinterest on my smartphone to be very useful when sitting waiting for an appointment.

I’ve used other photo sites like Tumblr and Flickr.  I find tumblr to be very similar to Pinterest, and I can’t be bothered with both of them.  Flickr is very nice, especially since so many historical institutions have posted their photo archives.  But it’s not a site I spend much time on, and I never post photos there.  It tends to overlap in usefulness with Instagram, which I do find myself using every day.  Why?  Because Instagram has an actual social feel to it.  People post things from their real lives.  It has a fun voyeuristic feel.

If you read a lot of blogs, you might try Bloglovin’, which is actually just a page that previews all the blogs you follow there.  I find it saves me a great deal of time.

So feel free to follow and friend, and to suggest people I should be following at Instagram, Bloglovin’  and Twitter.

And please, let me thank all of you again for supporting my writing and my love of fashion history.