Creating Traps with a URL
Did you know that you can start a Trap with a URL?
If you find an interesting article or blog post on a topic you’d like to start a trap on, just copy the URL in your browser, click “new trap” in the upper right hand corner of your Trap.it account, paste in your URL, and click “create trap.” It’s that easy.
Using a URL to start a trap works best when the article or post is fairly specific to the topic you want.
This is because Trap.it uses the page you’ve provided the link for to determine keywords to use for your trap. The presence of words is crucial and specificity is key, so make sure you choose URLs for articles/posts that are specific to the topic you’d like to start a trap on and contain text (articles/posts that contain only images or videos don’t give keywords to work with).
For example, I’ve chosen to start my bounce music trap using an article on Big Freedia taken from the LA times Pop & Hiss music blog. I was reading the blog in the general blog view but made sure to click through to the Big Freedia post to get to the URL that is specific to this post, rather than the general URL for the entire blog (ie I used http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/07/big-freedia.html instead of http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/).
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If I’d used the URL for the entire music blog my trap would have been too general because it would have pulled keywords from the entire blog. Providing the more specific URL means I wont get articles about Harry and the Potters or Coldplay in my Bounce Trap.
If I was interested in creating a more general trap (say a music trap) I would probably start that trap with keywords rather than a URL to make sure that my trap was general enough. Because if I started a music trap using the URL for the entire LA Times music blog Trap.it would pull some rather specific keywords (Coldplay, Big Freedia, Harry and the Potters…) that would narrow the focus of my very general trap too much. Starting a music trap with the keyword “music,” on the other hand, would start my trap very general and allow me to narrow its focus as needed through training.
Speaking of training, remember to train your traps no matter how you form them. Language is a complicated thing and just because my original Big Freedia article prominently mentions the Echoplex doesn’t mean I want more information on that venue. Like articles and posts that are relevant to your trap and dislike the ones that aren’t to refine the focus of your trap.
-Laura