Keep your inventory under control (Introduction)

This article was published in Fusion Magazine, February 2014. Click for the magazine!

Greetings everybody! If there's something unpleasant, yet necessary to do in SL, that is sorting inventory. On one hand, it's frustrating to search for an item we want to use, and not being able to find it. On the other hand, an excessively large inventory may carry with it some bad side effects.

The first important thing to realize is that this is a task that has to be performed periodically. If we sort our inventory today, depending on our shopping habits, perhaps we need to sort it again every other week, every month... The frequency is not the same for everybody, but it is something you'll have to do from time to time.

If this is the first time you're going to seriously sort your inventory, or if it's been a long time since you last did... Keep in mind, this is no five minute task. It may take you from several hours to several days. It depends on how many items are left to sort, and how thorough you want to be.

As a matter of fact, even setting our mindset to inventory sorting, and establishing a routine that works for us, takes some preparation. For this reason, we'll be outlining here the stages that will be developed in future articles.

We will first talk about choosing a folder structure for our inventory that reflects the way in which we naturally look for information. This is a personal decision, and so several alternatives will be presented. We have to think which structure works better for us, and so decide.

After this, we will see how to create this folder structure in our inventory, and which tools SL has that allow us to move items, create copies or even special copies called "links."

Once our inventory is organized, we aren't done. We have to get used to packing, otherwise, our total number of items will grow out of control. It's a good idea to do our sorting and packing at the same time, but while we learn, we will do this in separate stages.

When packing, we will realize that there's a lot more than clothes in our inventory. Textures, poses, notecards, furniture, landmarks, calling cards... What do we do with all this? We will study some tools created by SL residents, learn about embedding in notecards, and more.

Join me, starting in the next issue.

Enjoy your SL.