How To Pull Yourself Together with Flavors.me

Flavors.me is a simple and elegant solution that helps you create an automatic lifestream of all your online content. It connects with your various social media accounts, pulls in your content from them, and displays it in a flexible and customizable interface. It was created by the team at Hiidef Inc., “a web product incubator started in 2008 by a team from Vimeo, Meetup, Pronto, IAC / InterActiveCorp and Digitalmash.”

Basic Info

The first thing you’ll want to do is fill in your basic information. This includes your name and a bio. Basic HTML is accepted in your bio, so you have the option to be creative, or just keep it simple. Your name will show up as the main title of your page in a huge font and you may run into trouble if your name is long, but this is configurable.

Add Services

Your next step is to connect your various social media services so that Flavors.me can start pulling in your data. They currently support Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, Last.fm, Facebook, Goodreads, Netflix, WordPress.com, Posterous, Blogger, LinkedIn, Etsy, Foursquare, YouTube, and RSS. I really like the user interface here. You simply click the service you want and authorize Flavors.me to connect with it or put in your username/URL. What you don’t have to do is give up your username and password. This is probably the simplest and easiest interface I’ve seen on any service for connecting to your other accounts. Most sites support OAuth style authentication, which you may be familiar with from Twitter, so it’s as easy as 2 clicks to connect most of your sites.

Configure Your Layout

Your next step will be to configure your layout. This is a pretty important step as you want to make sure your design reflects who you are. The Design Panel makes this a simple task, though. There are currently 3 basic layouts available: Simple, Widescreen, and Accordion. Experiment with each to see which will work best for you, including playing with the layout’s alignment (left, center, or right).

Your next step will be to choose a background. Currenly, you have to upload a background because there are no presets. Be sure to pick a background that compliments your layout. For instance, you don’t want to choose something incorporating your face or logo only to have it permanently obscured by your content.

Choose your title and content fonts from the list and watch them update in realtime so that you can see what they look like. From here, you can also modify the size of the fonts for your name, description, and service links. You might also want to tweak your navigation bullets.

The most flexible area to configure can also become the most complicated one and that is your color palette. Either choose from one of the 8 presets, or get creative and create your own custom palette. You might do this if you’re trying to match your logo or the background you uploaded. You can choose background colors for the Main Page (background), About, and Content. For the text, you can set colors for the Title, About, Navigation, Primary, Secondary, and Links.

Final Thoughts

Flavors.me is similar to a bunch of other apps we’ve talked about, including Chi.mp, Gizapage, and DandyID. The difference here is in the simplicity and presentation of your content. Rather than a simple river of random content from your online social life, Flavors.me separates each service into it’s own custom display. YouTube videos and Flickr photos are displayed as a gallery, while Foursquare shows your latest checkin, your badges, and then your checkin history. Flavors.me is currently in private beta, but you should be able to snag an account using the invite code “heat.” Also, check out Bakari’s review at MakeUseOf.

About the Author
Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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