Wednesday 29 May 2013

Do you ever wonder whether you've entered a competition?

We all have our own ways of organising our comping, whether we use bookmarks, a spread sheet, the thanks button on a forum, a tracking system on a comping website or just memory, but whatever system we use, there comes a time when you look at a competition and can't for the life of you remember whether you've entered. And it must be somebody-or-other's law (if not, maybe it should become Willis's Law) that the ones you can't remember entering are the ones that strictly only allow one entry, and could disqualify you if you enter more than once, or let you fill in a lengthy and time consuming form before saying "Sorry, you've already entered."

However there's a handy new tool available for compers, called Diigo, that lets you put a tiny virtual post-it note onto a website. I'm sure it is intended for all sorts of uses, but I can see the value to compers right away. Registration with  Diigo is free, and you can pop a little button called a Diigolet on your favourites bar, then when you visit a site and enter the competition, click on your Diigolet button and fill in the date and time you entered in the note that appears.

When you visit a site and can't remember entering, click on your Diigolet and if you've made a note it will appear. If it a one off competition, you'll know you've entered. if it is a daily, monthly or weekly entry one, you can check whether you've entered the current one or not.

I've been playing with it for a few days and I'm finding it most useful for those competitions that insist on you leaving EXACTLY 24 hours between your entries for daily competitions or 7 days for weekly ones. By popping my entry date and time onto a note, I can be absolutely certain every entry I make is a valid one and none of my entries will be rejected or disqualified.

There is a lot more to Diigo than just post-it notes. It can be used on iOS or Android and can import your bookmarks so you can access them from all your devices. I can see I'm going to have a lot of learning to do, but I can see already what a handy tool it is, so I thought I'd share it with you right away.

By the way, I've not been asked to post this - I stumbled on an American comper's blog last week and saw them recommending it, and thought I'd give it a whirl.

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