Introduction

As someone who does a lot of reading and even more writing, I was pleased to discover Wakelet. It’s an online application for collating resources of different kinds. When I come across a website I think will be useful for a course I’m teaching, a story I’d like to read later, or a video I think I might wish to reference in an article I write, I save the link to it in Wakelet.

You can organise resources into Collections. For example, the screenshot below shows the front page of a collection of resources for a blogging course I’ll be teaching, while the screenshot below it depicts a few of the resources in that Collection.

Adding to Collections

Adding resources could hardly be easier. In fact, there are several ways of doing so.

Share from a phone

If you come across a website you like while browsing on your phone, you can use the Share facility to send it to Wakelet. You’ll need to install the Wakelet app first, obviously.

Add from within Wakelet

Sign into Wakelet, create or edit the Collection to which you wish to save the resource, then click the plus sign:

As you can see, it’s possible to add a variety of resources. And as you will have noticed from the earlier screenshot, adding a resource shows a picture of it, not just a link.

Add from tabs

If you install the Wakelet extension on your browser, Wakelet opens every time you start a new tab. The tabs you have open are listed vertically on the right-hand side of the screen, as shown here:

What you can then do is drag a tab you want to save onto a Collection icon, and that’s it.

Create a Collection from tabs

You’ll notice that at the bottom of the tab listing is a button labelled “Create collection with tabs”. This is a real time-save, because if you’re amassing resources to use, and every tab on the screen is a resource you wish to save, clicking that button saves them all to a new Collection at once.

Sharing a Collection
Collections are private by default, meaning that only you can see them. However, you can choose to share a Collection with others in a number of ways, as shown here:

I particularly like the option to export the Collection as a PDF, for two reasons.

Firstly, it’s so quick and easy. I’ve already created a a PDF of resources for a blogging course I’m teaching (see below), and that involved copying and pasting links to a wordprocessed document and then saving that as a PDF. Reordering items is time-consuming, and if I forget where I’ve saved the original document or accidentally delete it, changing the list in any way will be a major pain. If I create a PDF from Wakelet, all I have to do is edit the Collection as necessary, and then just export it again.

Secondly, the PDF created via Wakelet is much more visually interesting and attractive than the list of URLs I created in a document. Here’s one I created earlier:

Conclusion

All in all, Wakelet is a wonderful tool, and made even better by the knowledge that it’s free. Oh, and by the way, the “95” in my name on the document does not refer to my age, even though I feel it sometimes. That name was generated automatically by Wakelet.