text: (CNN) -- For Heather Neroy, it used to be a tedious process: Whenever she came across an interesting arts-and-crafts project or recipe on the Internet, she would save it for later by copying the link, pasting it into an e-mail and sending it to herself. 
  
  After that Neroy, a stay-at-home mom from Southern California, would file the e-mail in a folder for future reference. It wasn't exactly the most efficient system. 
  
  Then last year, during one of her browsing sessions, she read a blog post that gushed about a new website called Pinterest. The virtual pinboard, where users can pin and organize images onto individual "boards," didn't pique Neroy's interest at first, but she quickly changed her mind. 
  
  "Someone described it as an online filing system, and I thought, 'That's exactly what I need,' " she said. 
  
  Soon Neroy was pinning away and, like many Pinterest users, got quickly hooked. She first started with a Halloween board where she pinned costume ideas. Next, Neroy created a shared color board for redecorating her daughter's bedroom that she and her husband could add to. 
  
  Pinterest also allows other users to follow each other's boards and "re-pin" another person's images. In no time Neroy was sharing other people's pins and following users with similar tastes. 
  
  "It's been really neat to see what other moms are pinning," she said. "Some days you run out of ideas and you don't know what to do to fill the time before bedtime. I thought it was going to be just me organizing, but it's really a community sharing all these different ideas that I didn't even know existed." 